this is the Earnest to see

July 24, 2005 performance, reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Oscar Wilde is streaking gloriously through the Berkshires this summer and Director Julianne Boyd’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest now playing at the Barrington Theatre Festival is all that Oscar meant it to be.

In this, his last play, Wilde produced what is perhaps the most brilliant (and most often produced) farce in the genre. With no slapstick, violence, bawdiness or excessive speed and using the stock farce concepts of unknown parentage, confusion of identity, and withheld secrets, with casual insouciance, he tossed off in three weeks a play that has glittered across stages for more than a hundred years.

Before opening night in London in 1895 Wilde casually remarked, "The play is a success. The only question is whether the audience will be a success." He might have added, "and if the director and actors are a success." In the current production, they undeniably are.

The plot is too well-known to summarize (and its delights should be withheld from any audience members who need to be surprised). It is enough to know that it hinges on two young men named Jack and Algernon who, for devious reasons, call themselves Ernest and two young women, Gwendolyn and Cecily, who love them only because their names are Ernest. Each young woman is attended by a very earnest attendant — Cecily by her tutor Miss Prism and Gwendolyn by a formidable mother, Lady Bracknell.

The casting of Lady Bracknell is a key to any production and probably the hardest to play since over the years every great British actress has brought her talents to it and often received a title from the Queen for her accomplishments. The challenge is playing her with a difference. Each actress must bring to the role a perfect line reading that is her own, the knowledge of just when to pause, to accent, to underplay. She is insufferable, self-assured, haughty — the epitome of the oh-so-earnest Victorian cultural climate that makes the play so possible and delightful.

Carole Shelley rises to this challenge in body language, gesture, timing. She is every inch the imperious creature, dominating every scene in which she appears yet never stealing stage from the other actors.

Jack and Algernon (Christopher Innvar and Mark H. Dold) two cynical young men without a calling, parody upper class "dandies" with great earnestness and seriousness, dropping their epigrams with grace and defending their outrageous behavior with casual self-acceptance. Their assumed languor can spring into lively activity whether they are eating muffins or kneeling in a proposal.

Jack in deep mourning garb for a deceased (nonexistent) brother is every inch the grieving relative. And both Algy and Jack are delightful in their joy at the play’s end when they joyfully realize that the lies they have been telling have been truth all along.

Cecily (Meridith Zinner) is charmingly half-innocent from her first appearance with a watering can, charmingly skillful in ensnaring Algernon, and brilliantly defiant in her scenes with Gwendolyn where she wields a hefty cake knife and insists on calling a spade a spade. She is also convincing and politely but firmly defiant in confronting Lady Bracknell with her determination not to accept a 17 year engagement.

Gwendolyn (Jordon Simmons) is hilariously right in orchestrating Jack’s proposal scene — especially in her body language and insultingly imperious in her tea scene with Cecily.

As for Miss Prism (Tandy Cronyn), one believes she can have written (and abandoned) a disastrously bad three volume romance and, in her ineptitude as nursemaid, engineered a near disaster. Robert Zukerman (doing double duty as impeccable butler in act one and dotty clergy man in act two) is admirable in both roles.

The entire cast are as earnest as the mocking title urges them to be but, even in a few frantic chases about the stage, they never drop Oscar Wilde’s great intention, "to treat all trivial things very seriously and all serious things with studied triviality."

This is an all-out Barrington Stage Co. production. The two sets are magnificent. The first act in London played in an art-deco décor one might expect Algernon, esthete, to inhabit rather than a stuffy Victorian drawing room, and the second and third acts (wisely played as act two and running continuously) both played against a rose-bedecked backdrop. Designer Michael Anania has done himself and the Barrington stage proud as has costumer Elizabeth Flauto.

Whether you have seen The Importance of Being Earnest half a dozen times, as this reviewer has, or never experienced it in production at all, this is the Earnest to see. Oscar would have been satisfied with the audience reaction at the opening production on July 24th. They knew exactly what he intended and were the success he said his play needed. Go and enjoy.

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P.O. Box 1205,  Sheffield, MA 01257
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