The Alchemist (by Ben Jonson; produced by the New York City Theatre Company) is an almost ostentatiously neglected comic masterpiece. It could, without doubt, be shorter. But 300 years after it was written and long after alchemy went out of fashion, the play still teems with hard, bawdy, farcical fun; still gives that well-mated couple, greed and gullibility, a handsome thrashing; still rushes ahead with a plot that the great Samuel Taylor Coleridge adjudged "one of the three most perfect" in literature.**
Last week The Alchemist was given a lively airingas the first bill in...
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