Tony Award-winning actor Bill Irwin played the leading role of Argan in Molière’s “The Imaginary Invalid” when he was a high school student. More than 40 years later, the play was still lodged in his brain. “So you think, ‘This play is not leaving me alone’ — I’m still thinking about it many decades later,” Irwin told Broadway News. And that’s what led Irwin to revisit the centuries-old comedy, but not only as an actor.
Irwin has penned a new adaptation and is currently back in Argan’s shoes. “The Imaginary Invalid,” adapted by and starring Irwin, is in previews at Roundabout Theatre Company’s Todd Haimes Theatre, ahead of an official opening on Oct. 22. The play centers on Argan, a wealthy hypochondriac who spends his fortune on unnecessary medical treatments, willing to follow whatever any doctor prescribes. Argan’s hypochondria interferes with his family when he fixes to marry off his daughter to the son of a doctor who will soon be a doctor himself — just to have a physician in the family, even though Argan’s daughter is in love with someone else. Meanwhile, his second wife is biding her time until she can inherit his fortune.
The Roundabout production is the first Broadway revival in nearly 60 years, having briefly played the ANTA Playhouse (now the August Wilson Theatre) in 1967 after premiering on the Main Stem in 1917. But both of those mountings were billed as translations from Molière’s French. Irwin’s is an adaptation.
“It’s always been my favorite play, but it is what the scholars love to call a ‘problem play,’” Irwin explained. And Irwin recruited director Brandon J. Dirden to help solve the “problem.” Dirden is a longtime Broadway actor who earned his first Tony nomination for his turn in the 2025 revival of “Waiting for Godot.” But he’s also been directing in the regionals, and makes his Main Stem directorial debut with “The Imaginary Invalid.”
“One thing that Bill has is infinite curiosity — that’s where he and I really do connect, that we're so curious,” Dirden said. “And so to find a partner in Bill where we can just nerd out and obsess over the smallest things to see what's going to get the story just that much better or clearer or more entertaining, it’s a joy.”
Clarity has been at the crux of their work. So much so that Irwin actually began his process by commissioning a fresh, word-for-word English translation of the original text. “I did one smart thing: I went to a dear longtime colleague of mine, Doug Skinner, whom I was onstage with in a piece called ‘The Regard of Flight,’” Irwin explained. “Doug is the most exquisite deadpan performer, ventriloquist… Now at this stage of his life, he's almost exclusively working as a translator of obscure and period French works.”
