Tag Archives: Oscar Wilde

Great New Jersey Theater!

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Some shows you enjoy, some inspire a “meh,” and some occupy a “don’t miss!” category. In our family, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is in that last group, and the new production at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, which opened Saturday and runs through June 1, knocks it out of the park! STNJ artistic director Brian B. Crowe and the cast reveal and revel in every bit of the penetrating wit that makes this show perennially popular.

The crux of the story is that two young women are determined to marry men with the given name Ernest, a name epitomizing sober seriousness. Unfortunately, they’ve fixed on a pair of society gentlemen of the complete opposite temperament. Neither is named Ernest, though both pretend to be. Even worse, because a man needs certain credentials to marry a society daughter, the origins of one of them are completely unknown. It’s left to dowager Aunt Augusta to get to the bottom of the case, or suitcase, as it were.

While the play is most definitely a comedy, and in this production the audience appreciated the humor immensely, the humor works because of Wilde’s spot-on observations about human behavior at the extremes.

Christian Frost plays Algernon Moncrieff, nephew of Aunt Augusta, and Tug Rice plays Jack Worthing, aspirant to the hand of her daughter, Gwendolen. Not only do these two actors deliver their lines with perfect comic timing, their body language and gestures make the always-slightly-ridiculous situation even more so.

Marion Adler is perfection as the unyielding Lady Augusta Bracknell, with Carolyne Leys her besotted daughter, Gwendolen. She believes all is well with her engagement to Worthing until she meets his hitherto unknown and suspiciously beautiful ward, Cecily Cardew, played by Joyce Meimei Zheng. The two young women immediately feign deep friendship, but you know the claws will come out once the unmasking of the pseudonymous Ernests begins.

In smaller roles, Richard Bourg plays both manservant to Algernon and later to Jack. Though he’s in the background, his reactions to the young people’s shenanigans add a great deal. Alvin Keith plays the country parson being tapped to christen or re-christen the men with new names, and Celia Schaefer plays Miss Prism, tutor to Cecily, who unexpectedly holds the key to the whole dilemma.

The young men may not be Ernests, yet, but they are definitely Earnest when it comes to love!

A word about the set. There are three scenes (Algernon’s flat, Worthing’s country garden, and, finally, his drawing-room), and the design accommodates all three with just enough elegant detail. Delicious costumes and atmospheric lighting effects in the garden scene too. STNJ productions are hosted at Drew University in Madison, N.J. (easily reachable from NYC by train). For tickets, call the box office at 973-408-5600 or visit the Box Office online.

The Importance of Being Earnest

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Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, is putting on a silky-smooth version of Oscar Wilde’s classic satire, now through December 3. Although the witty dialog keeps coming and coming, you dare not do more than chuckle or you’ll miss the next line. The show’s directed by Michael Cumpsty, whom Princetonians may remember as Henry Higgins in McCarter Theatre’s excellent My Fair Lady a few years back.

Importance of Being Earnest

Sam Lilja & Liesel Allen Yeager, photo by T. Charles Erickson

And here are a few of those timeless lines:

  • The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
  • I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
  • All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.
  • No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.
  • The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

Artistic Director John Dias’s program notes say this about Wilde’s brilliant dialog: “We feel both horror and delight when witnessing this expert employment of language—its flexibility and the kind of doubleness of meaning that both masks truth and somehow reveals it.”

If you haven’t seen this play recently—or if by some mishap you’ve never seen it—this is a sparkling version. The two leads, friends Algernon Moncrieff (played by Sam Lilja) and Jack Worthing (Federico Rodriguez) are especially strong, and Liesel Allen Yeager’s Cecily Cardew is a delightful flirt.

The men fall in love, and though the women are willing, circumstances are not. How they sort out the absurdity of  Jack’s dubious origins—as a baby, he was found in a handbag in Victoria Station (“The line is immaterial!”)—and the women’s outré determination to marry men named Earnest . . . well you’ll have to experience those pleasures for yourself.

Excellent scenery from Charlie Corcoran and costumes from Jess Goldstein.

In a before-the-show talk, cast member Henry Vick (perfect as Algie’s super-discreet butler) reminds audience members that only a few months after this play opened in London to great acclaim in 1895, Wilde was convicted of gross indecency with men and sentenced to two years’ hard labor. He never wrote another play.

Today, 117 years since Wilde’s death in Paris, a penniless man, we can reflect on how Victorian society, which he skewered so lightheartedly in Earnest, would seem to have had the last word, yet the fact that audiences still delight in his work and flock to see it  suggests a different outcome.

****Jack the Ripper: Case Closed

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Doyle and WildeBy Gyles Brandreth – London’s 1888 Whitechapel Murders have provided seemingly endless inspiration for authors’ speculation. Latest in this parade of theorists exploring the grisly deaths of five prostitutes is a former Conservative member of Britain’s Parliament, actor, and broadcaster who uses the real-life friendship between playwright Oscar Wilde and Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle as his premise.

Six years after the Jack the Ripper murders, these two luminaries are brought into the investigation by another real-life character, Metropolitan Police CID Chief Constable Melville Macnaghten. Why them? Most of Macnaghten’s chief suspects are known to Wilde and, the detective says, “you are a poet, a Freemason and a man of the world. All useful qualifications for the business at hand.”

The police are resurrecting their failed investigation for several reasons. Because Macnaughten is writing a definitive report and would like to provide a conclusion. Because he wants to end speculation about the identity of the killer, which, in the absence of a convincing alternative, even occasionally extends to the late Prince Eddy, Duke of Clarence and Avondale. And, because a new murder has occurred that bears all the hallmarks of a Ripper case, except that the body was found not in Whitechapel but in Chelsea. More particularly, in the alley behind Tite Street, where Wilde and Macnaghten have their homes.

Whether you fully buy into the plausibility of this notion, you cannot deny that it makes for an entertaining read, as Brandreth is able to draw on the wide and diverse acquaintanceships Wilde had among members of London society, high and low. He does a creditable job of eliminating Macnaghten’s weaker suspects—the suicide John Druitt, the spiritualist Walter Wellbeloved, and actor Richard Mansfield. He avails himself of opportunities to mention Wilde’s friend, the painter Walter Sickert, briefly considered a suspect in real life. (As evidence of the long half-life of Jack the Ripper theories, American mystery author Patricia Cornwell produced her second book attempting a case against him last February.) Brandreth then constructs a scenario in which the more unsavory suspects and some new players can cavort.

Brandreth has written six other mysteries featuring Oscar Wilde and his circle, sometimes including Doyle, and he knows his principal character and their London milieu well. If you’re familiar with Wilde’s plays, you’ll recognize various lines in the witty epigrams he’s constantly spouting. Brandreth liberally butters the narrative with other literary allusions as well. There’s even a character named Bunbury, and you know what happened to him.

As to the clever resolution and identification of “the real Jack,” this may not be so satisfactory. The motivation is weak and the method (which I cannot reveal as it would be a spoiler) is now discredited, though it was thought effective in the Victorian era. These issues, which would be serious in a contemporary crime thriller, are almost beside the point in this book. It’s a case of the journey being more important—and entertaining—than the destination.