In 1664, the religious satire Tartuffe got Molière in hot water with the Church, which was no laughing matter. Nor was it a reason not to attack softer targets with the same weapons. Eight years later, in The Learned Ladies, Molière did just that, skewering pretentious intellectuals of both sexes. Once again, a disrupter we don’t meet until Act Three of a five-act play has a well-to-do Paris household at sixes and sevens. But whereas the pious fraud Tartuffe sucks all the air from the room even when he isn’t there, in The Learned Ladies, it’s the delulu mistress of the house, Philaminte, who drives the show. The play, the second-to-last in the Molière canon, is in sneaky ways one of his most startling. Yet outside France, it has never caught on. Its sole airing on Broadway, in 1911, lasted all of a week. And in our time, the implicit sexism of the title alone makes the script an all but phosphorescent proposition. There’s no denying that Molière comes down hard on Philaminte and certain errant bees in her hive—but not because they are women. In his court of poetic justice, common sense, enterprise, and self-awareness beat folly, passivity, and rampant ego. Hats off to Juilliard’s stars of tomorrow for broaching this neglected masterpiece. And grand merci for mounting it in the translation by Richard Wilbur, whose Augustan couplets lent dazzle to late-20th-century Broadway revivals of The School for Wives, The Misanthrope (twice), and Tartuffe (three times). —Matthew Gurewitsch