For a perfectly delicious summer treat, PCPA will offer a new production of Oscar Wilde‘s immortal farce The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), directed by Roger DeLaurier, with sets by Jason Bolen, costumes by Sara Curran Ice, lighting by Jennifer ‘Z’ Zornow, sound by Elisabeth Weidner, voice/dialect coaching by Andrew Philpot, and Christine Collins* serving as the production’s stage manager.
Earnest stars Michael Brusasco* as Jack Worthing, Yusef Seevers as Algernon Moncrieff, Erik Stein* as the Rev. Canon Chasuble, Peter S. Hadres* as Lane/Merriman, Kitty Balay* as Lady Bracknell, Emily Task* as Gwendolen Fairfax, Katie Fuchs-Wackowski as Cecily Cardew, and Polly Firestone Walker as Miss Prism.
(*Member, Actors’ Equity Association)
ALGERNON: Why is it that at a bachelor’s establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne? I ask merely for information.
LANE: I attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir. I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand.
ALGERNON: Good heavens! Is marriage so demoralising as that?
Oscar Wilde’s reputation as a playwright rests upon the brilliant quartet comprised of Lady Windermere’s Fan [1892], A Woman of No Importance [1893], An Ideal Husband [1895], and The Importance of Being Earnest [1895]. All are still regularly staged or filmed, though none so frequently as Earnest.
(A fifth play, the scandalous Salomé: A Tragedy in One Act [1894], has sneaked into the standard repertoire in the form of Richard Strauss’s operatic adaptation.)
Of the four, only the last can be described as a comedy and nothing else — that is, it does not set out to teach any moral lessons whatever.
The earlier three, though they abound with Wilde’s trademark wit and paradox, are most accurately identified as melodramas: we are brought to deal with a “fallen” woman, or a statesman who has betrayed his public trust, or some other such confrontation between social truths and the eternal variety.
I don’t, by the way, share the conventional view that these earlier plays are somehow inferior to Earnest — that their moral elements are flaws. Lady Windermere’s Fan is in no sense a “weaker” play than, say, Terence Rattigan‘s The Winslow Boy [1946] or Noël Coward‘s A Song at Twilight [1966].
In any case, our modern distaste for sermonizing, no matter how deftly done, has led us to celebrate Earnest as Wilde’s masterpiece.
Nor is Earnest completely free of keen psychological insights, often given voice by Lady Bracknell, who has absolutely no sense of irony. There is, for instance, her reaction when Gwendolyn tells her she is engaged to Jack/Earnest Worthing:
“Pardon me, you are not engaged to any one. When you do become engaged to some one, I, or your father, should his health permit him, will inform you of the fact. An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be. It is hardly a matter that she could be allowed to arrange for herself …”
Put like this, in a Victorian farce, we can laugh at it; put in sterner terms, by a real Victorian mother, it is not at all funny.
Still, moral encomiums, delivered with a reasonably straight face in the earlier plays, come out as satire in Earnest, especially in the mouth of Lady Bracknell:
“To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. And I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to?”
Yet, Wilde was a socialist, a feminist and a moralist, and a great deal of his brilliance consisted in his ability to imbed these opinions within a witty paradox.
Nevertheless, there occasionally escapes an example of what Al Gore would call an inconvenient truth. For example, if a man wants to infuriate a woman, he can do no better than to quote Algernon’s dictum: “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.” Then, duck.
The Importance of Being Earnest plays Aug. 15-24 at the Marian Theater in Santa Maria, 870 S. Bradley Road. Tickets are $38-$50 (discounts for senior, student, child, military). Tickets and other information are available by calling 805-922-8313, or online at www.pcpa.org.
The play moves to the Festival Theater in Solvang, 420 2nd St., Aug. 29 through Sept. 8. Tickets are $49-$50 (discounts for senior, student, child, military). Tickets and other information are available by phone at 805-922-8313, or online at www.pcpa.org.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.