Tag Archives: romance

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.

Good Health, Good Luck, Good Reading

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Beer

photo: Phil King, creative commons license

Here are a few of my favorite books by Irish writers. Grab one of these books and pour yourself something tarry. Sláinte!

Literature

    • Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha won the Man Booker Prize for its recounting of the life of a 10-year-old Dublin boy whose family is on the eve of destruction.
    • The Gathering by Anne Enright, another Booker prize-winner “has more layers to it—of grief, love, lightness, tragedy, absurdity, and trauma—than an onion, and may cause as much weeping” says The American Scholar. I felt privileged to hear her reading last year under auspices of Princeton’s Fund for Irish Studies.
    • The Year of the French is a wonderful historical tale (part of a trilogy) by American writer Thomas Flanagan. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Don’t know who Wolf Tone was? Read this and you will.
    • The International by Glenn Patterson, another writer who has appeared in Princeton, and his The International is the story of a single night in the bar of the International Hotel, while upstairs a consequential meeting forming the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. It’s not about militants at all but about state-of-mind.
    • You may think there’s not much new literary territory to explore in male-female sexual relations, yet award-winning author Eimear McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians finds it and mines it. Innovative, immersive, dazzling.

Crime/Thrillers

  • Tana French is an American who’s lived in Dublin for nearly thirty years. In her books about the Dublin Murder Squad, she has created what might be termed an ensemble production, as each department member takes a turn in the leading role. Of these, I’ve read Broken Harbor, featuring Dublin detective “Scorcher” Kennedy.
  • The Ghosts of Belfast, by Stuart Neville won the LA Times Book Prize for its depiction of an IRA assassin unable to come to terms with his past. Edge-of-your seat.
  • Adrian McKinty writes about crime in his native Belfast amidst the Troubles. His detective, Sean Duffy, is a rare Catholic in the Royal Ulster Constabulary. The Cold, Cold Ground is first in the series. The 2017 entry—which I would want to read based on the title alone—is Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly. I recommend the audio versions for the super narration by Gerard Doyle.


Finally, to quote another notable Irish writer, Oscar Wilde, “If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.” Any of these is worth more than one pass!