Entrances are of extreme importance in the structure of a performance. The actor and the director join together to search for the right note to begin the stage life of a character. The Greeks and Commedia employed masks that left no doubt – when combined with gestural body language – as to the immediate impression their entrances would make upon an audience. In later theater, the means employed are more subtle, more subliminal, more suggestive. The entrance is the first note in the polarity of the whole play that will be remembered, perhaps subconsciously, when the character's journey is completed at the end of the play.

Le Tartuffe; ou, L'Imposteur, Molière's first psychological thriller, offers the possibility of several brilliant entrances, and we submit three “case studies” to illuminate “how” these moments became coups de théâtre in three different productions: Molière's own, as reported by contemporaries; my production at the Los Angeles Theater Center, in which Ron Leibman created an unforgettable portrait of the quintessential hypocrite; and Ariane Mnouchkine's prescient political interpretation for the stage as experienced by the audience in which I participated.

Here is how Ramon Fernandez, in his La vie de Molière, describes the first entrance in 1664 of the lusting religious imposter, Tartuffe. In the play that bears his name, he entered the enormous space designed to accommodate the hordes of singers and dancers in the huge festival for the king called Les Plaisirs de l'Île Enchantée (The Pleasures of the Enchanted Island):