GO  THE DOCTOR DESPITE HIMSELF In Molière’s farce, oafish woodcutter Sganarelle (Charles Fathy), his wife, Martine (Clara Bellar), (Brad Schmidt), (Raquel Brussolo), (Steven Houska). The first thing you need to know, even before watching the play’s casual thumpings, is that director Gulu Montiero’s madcap production is steeped in the art of the clowning. The show has the wonderfully shrill pitch and frantic pace of a living cartoon. The cast know the way around the 17th-century gags — and the goofiness is heightened by designer Swinda Reichelt’s jaw-dropping costumes, which turn these classical characters into outlandish figures risen from some other dimension. Sganarelle, Fathy’s grinning mug floats in what appears to be a blubbering multicolored beach ball, and when he turns into “the doctor,” he is fitted with a bizarre collar with dangling tassles your cats would adore. Sganarelle’s spiteful wife wears a plastic-y swoop skirt covered with rubber balls — and she then returns later as a sexy housemaid, wearing weird plastic blond braids and gigantic plaster breasts. The result of all this artistry is a production that is both timeless and yet cracklies with the freshness of a living children’s picture book.