Oscar Wilde Classic Lives Up To Its Promise

“Importance of Being Earnest” Friday, Sept. 19, Interplayers Ensemble

Sight unseen, I had already picked this production of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” as one of the four most promising plays of the new theater season.

Now it’s time to answer the question: Does it live up to its promise?

Of course it does. How can you go wrong with Oscar Wilde? I have a few small reservations about this production, but even so, I am convinced more than ever that this is one of the most relentlessly clever plays ever written.

For sheer wit, I can’t think of any play that packs so much inventiveness into every single line. Virtually every sentence contains either a Wildean bon mot, an ironic dig, or an old-fashioned punch line.

In fact, it occurred to me about halfway through this play that “The Importance of Being Earnest” may have served as a blueprint for the most popular comedy of 100 years later, “Seinfeld.” Look at the parallels: Both are about completely self-absorbed and idle characters, both revel in superficiality for laughs, and both are about, more or less, nothing.

I can almost hear Jerry saying (in less elegant language, of course): “Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven’t got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die” (from Act I).

Americans accustomed to our plain language may, of course, have some trouble accepting Wilde’s refined wordiness, but that, too, is one of the major joys of this play: Hearing the most shallow and selfish sentiments expressed in such graceful language. To me, that makes it all the funnier.

This ensemble cast does a good job with all of these flowery and sardonic words. There is an occasional tendency to go over the top. Some of the accents are a bit overripe. Patt Blem as Lady Bracknell lays it on a bit thick at times. R. Marquam Krantz comes off as a bit whiny in the main role of John Worthing.

Yet the ensemble as whole, including Richard R. Hamblin, Gary Pierce, Erin Merritt, Kelly Lloyd, Gail Smith Reynolds, and William C. Marlowe, makes the whole endeavor run smoothly and easily. Many scenes, as directed by Bob Welch, crackle with energy.

The best scenes were those between Algernon, brilliantly played by Hamblin as a merry cynic, and Cecily, equally well played by Merritt as a self-absorbed and spoiled young woman. Their second act scenes together had the rapid volley-and-return pace of a good tennis match.

Algernon: I hope, Cecily, I shall not offend you if I state quite frankly and openly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection.

Cecily: (seriously) I think your frankness does you great credit, Ernest.

, DataTimes