“Health is laughter,” a character says in Moliere’s 353-year-old comedy, which America’s foremost stage clown Bill Irwin has brought  back to Broadway for the first time in six decades, in a starry, gorgeously designed production opening tonight at Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theater. If Irwin’s adaptation of “The Imaginary Invalid,” directed by Brandon J. Dirden, is too stylized for all the laughs to have landed for me, Moliere’s excoriating satire about doctors and the medical profession still resonates.

Irwin portrays Argan, a hypochondriac who wants his daughter to marry the son of a doctor, in hopes perhaps of getting a discount because his medical bills are so high. But his daughter Angelique (Ava Lalezarzadeh) has just met Cleante, the man of her dreams (Daniel Croix Henderson.)

The play can be viewed as a fight for Argan’s soul between the good guys and the bad guys.

The bad guys include Argan’s wife Beline (Crystal A. Dickinson) with her co-conspirator, the notary Bonnefoy (Hiram Delgado), who is only interested in Argan’s money, and wants to send Angelique to a convent to have it all for herself; and  the pompous Dr. Diaforus Purgon (Brooks Ashmanskas) with his dim son Thomas (Hiram Delgado again) who encourage  the perfectly healthy Argan in his delusion that he suffers from a wide variety of maladies. “He will proceed, with a rigidity of confidence, in his purging and his bleeding and his billing,”  Berald says about Dr. Purgon.

Berald (Dylan Baker) is Argan’s brother, and one of the two good guys. The other is Toinette, Argan’s servant (Rachel Bloom, making a colorful Broadway debut.) She impersonates a doctor who is so over-the-top (suggesting that Argan remove his right eye to improve the vision of his left) that she may hope it finally turns Argan away from his other quacks. She also cooks up schemes to expose Beline and unite Angelique and Cleante.

Berald is the character who told Argan that “health is laughter,” and wants to get him away from his worries and his doctors by taking him to a play by Moliere.

“Molière?!?!”

“Yes.”

“That Molière who thinks he is so funny as he mocks our hard-working doctors…He’s a smart aleck, so full of himself and his conceits… The stage should stop wasting our time. And Molière, if he gets sick, should suffer his illness without any doctors offering to help him”

And, yes, Moliere’s reference to himself is in the original script. Astonishingly, Moliere was acting in the title role of this, his last play, when he collapsed on stage, and died a few hours later.

But Moliere gets the last laught, because the persistent appeal of Moliere’s plays can allow Bill Irwin to append in his name, a memorable verse of medical advice:

Good Friends, if
The profit motive puts you through a portal
To poke and peel you
And the billing services double deal you
And that AI voice can never hear the real you
Know there are still good doctors among us who will strive to heal you.
(Some of them are subscribers of this theater.)
And they will know,
To recommend the same good care givers that the Latin poet did, long ago:
First Doctor Joyful Song
(You can hum along,)
Then there is Dr Healthy Diet,
And of course primary care with Doctor, Peace and quiet
And may I this healing suggestion to you all impart:
Follow always the dancing in your heart.

The Imaginary Invalid
Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theater
Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission
Tickets:  $49 to $279
Written by Moliere, adapted by Bill Irwin, From a translation by Doug Skinner
Directed by Brandon J. Dirden
Scenic design by Beowulf Boritt; Costume Design by Karen Perry; Lighting Design by Allen Lee Hughes; Sound Design by John Gromada; Hair and Wig Design by Nikiya Mathis;

Cast: Brooks Ashmanskas as Dr. Diaforus Purgon, Dylan Baker as Berald, Rachel Bloom as Toinette, Hiram Delgado as Bonnefoy et al, Crystal A. Dickinson as Beline, Daniel Croix Henderson as Cleante, Bill Irwin as Argan and Ava Lalezarzadeh as Angelique