To dream the impossible dream! Many a Man of La Mancha has gone tilting the windmills of popular indifference to establish an American Royal Shakespeare Company or a Yankee Comédie Française, only to watch it fold after a year or three. The nonprofit Red Bull Theater, now in its 20th season, proudly cultivates the classics in a humbler niche.

Mainstage productions often focus on academic curiosities served up with populist flair—white elephants by the Bard’s contemporaries, for instance, or from Spain’s Golden Age. In an invaluable extension of the franchise, the company also stages readings of masterworks too rarely revived. Most may be seen in person or online. Molière’s Addamsesque final comedy The Imaginary Invalid (1673) streams live on Monday, February 19, and remains available online through the following Sunday.

The Rabelaisian part of Argan, the moneybags hypochondriac originally acted by the playwright himself, goes to Mark-Linn Baker, a funny man of vast experience and seasoned gravitas who began honing his Molière while still in training at the Yale Drama School over four decades ago. For competition, he has the porcelain beauty Annaleigh Ashford, fresh off her vaudevillean Mrs. Lovett in the Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd. As the maid Toinette, Ashford will be knocking herself out to save Argan from himself, going so far as to impersonate a bossy physician—thereby anticipating Mozart’s Così fan tutte by more than a century.

The scenario involves the usual commedia dell’ arte suspects: as the textbook tyrannical father, Argan has a rebellious daughter to lock horns with, not to mention a grasping merry widow-in-waiting, and con artists of many stripes. To think that while he was sending up the quacks of France, Molière was dying of tuberculosis, and that he collapsed at the fourth performance, dying hours after! Autumn’s in the air. The satire bites hard.

A word on language. The cut-crystal couplets of such Molière masterpieces as The School for Wives, The Misanthrope, andTartuffe pose gnarly challenges. The Imaginary Invalid, however, is written in prose. For Jeffrey Hatcher, who has adapted such classics as Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters and Gogol’s Government Inspector, this assignment should be a piece of cake—except for the mock Esperanto songs in the finale, which are best left just as they are.

The Imaginary Invalid will be performed and streamed live at Florence Gould Hall in New York on February 19 at 7:30 P.M. The video recording will be available for streaming from February 20 to February 25

Matthew Gurewitsch writes about opera and classical music for AIR MAIL. He lives in Hawaii