Alceste hates mankind. No one gives him the respect and honor he deserves. Although most people acknowledge his intelligence and wit, Alceste's flaw is his insistence on using those gifts against his fellow man as a demonstration of his own superiority. Even worse, Alceste has fallen helplessly in love with society's biggest coquette, the one woman whose outside affairs are destined to undermine his self-esteem, even as he is caught up amid the flurry of simultaneous court proceedings. Moliere captures human desires in all of their complexity in a psychological study that (in this adaptation) sparkles with wit in occasionally irreverent rhymed iambic pentameter.