When a farce begins each new scene with a tableau, you know you’re in trouble. Farces are supposed to be rollicking, door-slamming affairs that pick you up at the top of the show and then dump you down at the curtain call, leaving you too breathless to question the usually facile plot twists. But in Dog Run Rep’s production of Tartuffe, the actors freeze in various poses under blue lights while Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway play for a protracted length of time until the lights snap on and the play resumes.

Moliere’s Tartuffe is one of the funniest plays ever written, but you’d never know it from this wan production. Needlessly set in Manhattan during the ‘30s, Jeff Cohen’s adaptation has taken into account the minimal playing area of the Seaport Theater (the stage is dominated by a staircase, which audience members must utilize during intermission to reach the restrooms) and minimized the play itself. Gone is the obtuse Orgon (Keith Buterbaugh) watching the seduction of his wife by the hypocrite Tartuffe from beneath the table on which they grapple, replaced by Orgon standing in what would be the wings of a larger theater. That scene, when played as written, is one of the greatest scenes in all of theater, but Cohen’s change has lessened its impact, watering its comedy down in the same way the rest of the play has been.

The music that plays at the top of every scene and Anne E. Grosz’s costumes are the only nods to the new ‘30s setting in a major misstep, leaving no other reason for the change in period from 17th-century France than the chance to display a full arsenal of early 20th-century American accents and an easier job of costuming. Moliere’s morality play about the hypocrisies of the pious feels far more suited to the American ‘50s or ‘80s, not the rough-and-tumble 1930s. But instead, we’re presented with all the archetypes of old Hollywood, from the bubbly blonde sporting a New Yawk accent to the lockjaw playboy fiancé, played with a decided effeminate twist by Rob Maitner.

In fact, the only running theme of this Tartuffe is how gay all of the male characters seem (with the sole exception of husband and father Orgon). Aaron Costa Ganis has both a stutter and a lisp as the dolt of a son Damis, while the slim Brian Linden swishes through his scenes as the talky brother-in-law Cleante, wearing a tux that turns him into a dapper exclamation point right out of a Noel Coward play. But neither of them have anything on Tom Ford as Tartuffe. Sashaying around the stage, hands roaming through the air with abandon and occasionally lapsing into a hellfire-and-damnation Billy Graham accent, his Tartuffe seems less likely to seduce the lovely Elmire (Christine DeCicco) and far more likely to set his sights on Orgon.
All of this might be campy fun if any of the actors could spring themselves free of the Cohen’s dialogue in verse. But none of them manage to avoid the pitfall of delivering their lines in a sing-songy, Dr. Seuss manner, reducing everything they say to a comforting mush that lulls the audience into a near coma. As Orgon’s daughter Marianne, Katia Asche may fare the best, but her over-the-top pre-adolescent lisp obscures whatever she’s saying, so who can know for sure?

And there’s a disconnect between her role as the marriageable daughter, whom her father insists abandon her fiancé for Tartuffe, and the pigtails and pantaloons she’s dressed in. Presenting Marianne as a little girl when she has two men fighting over her adds a creepiness to the proceedings Moliere probably didn’t intend.

But then, confused as this production is, it’s hard to imagine what the play’s intent was. Cohen manages to indict no one with his adaptation, rendering Tartuffe an impotent comedy instead of the lusty, hilarious farce it should be. A play that once had the playwright imprisoned is now little more than a mildly amusing period trifle, the kind of thing that might appear late at night on Turner Classic Movies.

>Tartuffe
Through April 5, Seaport!, 210 Front St. (between Beekman & Fulton Sts.), 212-868-4444; times vary, $18.