Brandon J. Dirden revels in his Broadway directing debut with ‘The Imaginary Invalid’

Dirden and Bill Irwin, who adapted and stars in this fresh take on Molière’s classic comedy, are continuing a long journey with each other and the show.

Summary

• Brandon J. Dirden discusses making his Broadway directorial debut with The Imaginary Invalid and collaborating with adapter/star Bill Irwin on a fresh take
• Dirden is best known as a Tony Award-nominated actor who's performed in nine Broadway shows
• Molière's The Imaginary Invalid follows a hypochondriac who tries to get free healthcare by marrying his daughter to a doctor

Imagine it: Making your Broadway directing debut with your acting hero in a classic comedy about a hypochondriac. That’s just sick, in every great way.

Welcome to the happy reality of Brandon J. Dirden, who’s staging Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid in a new production adapted by and starring Tony Award winner Bill Irwin at the Todd Haimes Theatre.

“I pinch myself daily,” said Dirden, who recalled watching Irwin, in signature clown mode, on TV as a kid. “It was magical. They say never meet your heroes, but I highly recommend you do meet Bill Irwin because he’s the real deal.”

Ditto Dirden, who’s acted in nine Broadway shows, earning his first Tony nomination last season for playing Pozzo in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and made his debut as a stage director in 2015 at Two River Theater in New Jersey. “I mean, that Bill actually wanted to be in a room with me for this amount of time...”

Molière’s 1673 play revolves around illness-obsessed Argan, who treats his daughter’s marriage as a means of satisfying his own medical anxieties rather than considering her feelings. He figures if his son-in-law is a doctor, he can have constant access to medical attention — all for free.

Prior to this Broadway collaboration, Dirden called upon Irwin, a longtime Beckett interpreter, to speak about the Irish playwright for a class Dirden teaches as the co-head of acting and an associate arts professor in NYU’s graduate acting program.

They “hit it off,” said Dirden. “Bill told me he had this adaptation of Imaginary Invalid. I was first invited to be an actor in one of the readings, and when the opportunity came to actually produce it, it was his idea to bring me on as director.”

“He had seen a lot of my work as a director, and I guess he just felt I had the right sensibilities,” Dirden continued, with a smile. “Maybe he just felt like he could get away with doing whatever he wanted.”

In all seriousness, Irwin called Dirden’s work as a director “intrepid and capable” in a separate conversation with New York Theatre Guide. They both want the classic play to be just what the doctor ordered even now, some 350 years after its world premiere in France.

“Any time I approach a period piece or a classic play, my first question is, 'How is this useful for us today?'” said Dirden, adding that “ingredient number one” is that the show is a thoroughly good time. “It must, must, must be entertaining.”

“Secondly,” he continued, “what are we showing about humanity that is still relevant from 350 years ago to today? More than being entertaining, this play asks us to really interrogate choices that we make for ourselves and how they impact people around us, the people we love.”

That message comes through loud and clear courtesy of Argan, who is hellbent on having medical procedures that are doing him more harm than good, per Dirden. He’s not doing the people around him any favors either.

Dated? Not one bit. “We all can easily fall into a trap in our obsessive thinking about things,” Dirden said. “This play is asking us to take a bird’s-eye view, step outside of some of these ideas we have that have us in a chokehold.”

While the story itself is one point of access, Irwin’s adaptation is another. Dirden called the language “so easy in the mouth.” It is infused with “colloquialisms that you would hear today, while still honoring the absolute integrity of Molière,” he said. “I’ve often referred to this as a handshake with history. We are really using Molière’s text as a solid foundation for us to see ourselves today.”

“It’s not like we’re adding a lot of things out of 2026,” said Dirden, stressing that there’s “a timeless quality to the play itself, and it’s the timeless quality to the language that Bill is using.”

The original 17th-century production also wove music and dancing interludes into the show, and Dirden has preserved that construction.

“It’s not an all-out musical, so there aren't any big numbers you can search up on iTunes or Amazon Music or Spotify,” he said, smiling. “We aren’t going to make a cast album out of this at all. But one of Molière's greatest strengths was to incorporate all of the art forms, and so even in our opening and our closing, we celebrate movement, we celebrate song.”

And all the while, they're embracing the humor and satire designed to leave you in stitches, Dirden added. “We’re threading a very wonderful needle.”

Get The Imaginary Invalid tickets now.

Gillian Russo contributed reporting for this story.

Photo credit: The Imaginary Invalid on Broadway. (Photos by Joan Marcus)