"Jekyll & Hyde" @ Ashland
*Inner Child, Amok*/Play Review:/ “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” /by David Edgar, //Bowmer
Theater//, //Oregon// Shakespeare Festival (OSF), //Ashland//./
More than a century before Viagra, novelist Robert Louis Stevenson
dreamt – literally – of a potion that could restore lost youthful vigor
to middle-aged gaffers. He woke from the nightmare screaming and
straightway sat down to write his “penny-dreadful” classic about a prim,
Victorian medic in thrall to his own brutal Inner Child.
Pretty heady stuff for 1885. But nowadays, when psychotic serial killers
have become daily tabloid fare, we need some new subtexts to spice up
the old story. Playwright David Edgar, a veteran of Britain’s Marxist
“agitprop” theater movement of the 1970s, is happy to oblige. He tricks
out his protagonist with a full-blown Freudian father hang-up and
splices in a couple of extra characters to lend some feminist overtones.
These innovations prove a lot more stage-worthy than they may sound.
Edgar is a past master at using period diction to leaven his
contemporary polemics and deflect any sense of anachronism. In
/“Jekyll,”/ as in his Tony-award-winning /“Nicholas Nickleby,/” he has
his characters recite carefully redacted scene-setting narrative, as
well as dialogue, directly from the Victorian source text. This frankly
synthetic approach helps us accept Edgar’s offering as “theater of
ideas,” rather than more naturalistic action.
Then, too, all elements of the OSF production mesh smoothly to propel
the play inexorably forward, overriding any didactic clunkiness latent
in the script. Director Penny Metropulos paces the action briskly from
one /frisson/ to the next. In this she’s helped by veteran set designer
William Bloodgood, who uses an ingenious system of concentric revolving
stages to smoothly effect rapid-fire scene changes.
But the indisputable mainstay of the production is its star, James
Newsome, in the title role[s]. Past film and stage versions of /“Jekyll
and Hyde”/ have either used two different actors to portray the
schizophrenic protagonist, or else relied heavily on costume and make-up
to differentiate the dual identity.
No such hokey expedients for Newsome. To transit from the dour old
doctor to the dapper young thug and back, all he needs is a few
spasmodic jerks followed by a shockingly complete remake of his entire
muscle tone and vocal timbre. The effect is uncanny, as though we were
eye-witnessing a case of demonic possession.
Not that there’s anything overtly demonic about the Jekyll we first meet
– a kindly bachelor uncle and amiable host. But even in his genteel
London digs, late Victorian social upheavals intrude. Over port and
cigars, the good doctor and his gentleman cronies harrumph (in a
none-too-subtle echo of our own post-9/11 paranoia) about the “shrinking
security” of their bewilderingly mutable new world where “demons lurk
out there in the darkness.”
In other words, he’s a bit of a parlor bore, slightly tedious even to
himself. Everything about him – the crotchety stoop, the wheedling voice
with its tart Scottish brogue, the darting little bespectacled eyes –
bespeaks a sense of mid-life let-down. No wonder, when he discovers an
elixir-of-youth recipe in an old journal he’s inherited from his late
father, he grabs at the chance to reclaim lost vigor.
His experiment seems to pay off as a spry, young alter-ego comes
bursting out of the backroom lab and waltzes the astonished parlor maid
(Laura Morache, one of the spliced-in characters) a couple of whirls
around the drawing room before plunging off into the London fog. But
“Mr. Hyde” turns out to be unpredictably irascible, and his violent
street outbursts spark gossip about the doctor’s mysterious new
confidant. To fend off queries from friends and staff (as well as his
own growing qualms), Jekyll marshals all the instinctive guile of a
confirmed addict.
The seductive power of this addiction only becomes clear to us, though,
when we meet Mr. Hyde face-to-face in a soliloquy. Newsome plays this
tour-de-force scene with an intensity that’s exhausting to watch, much
as you’d wear yourself out trying to track the split-second mood shifts
and sheer physical vitality of a hyperactive three-year-old.
By turns crooning, wheedling, upbraiding or cackling at his own
scatological antics, Hyde is as self-absorbed as any toddler – all the
creepier in the full-grown figure of a caped and frock-coated dandy. In
his pre-moral universe, Hyde simply acts out any passing whim just for
the hell of it. It’s all the same to him – cutting a caper in
mid-stride, raping the parlor maid or clubbing to death a random
passerby in a Victorian precursor to modern-day “road rage.” Whatever he
does, Hyde is merely venting his youthful brio.
As such, he may be monstrous but he’s essentially innocent. Since he
knows no better, he cannot be held responsible for his depredations. The
true villain of the piece, paradoxically, turns out to be the
“respectable” doctor when he decides to renounce his dangerous
alter-ego. Fearful of detection, Jekyll callously cuts off any
connection that might link him to Hyde. He starts with the impregnated
parlor maid, who gets summarily turned out on the street.
But it’s too late for his cynicism to save him. Without even a chemical
trigger anymore, his vicious “baser” nature keeps seeping through the
priggish façade. Unable to suppress Hyde anymore, he winds up burgling
his own lab in search of an antidote.
And here’s where things get a little weird as Edgar falters under the
burden of his own weighty themes. In the lab, Hyde runs into the spurned
parlor maid, who has slunk back to plead mercy from her ex-boss. As soon
as she sees him, she implausibly enough divines the whole schizoid
mystery in an 11^th hour flash.
She even intuits the root cause of the syndrome: Jekyll’s childhood
alienation from his overweening father. Like a seasoned $100/hour
shrink, she coolly regresses him back through these nursery traumas.
Whereupon the doctor (or is it Hyde?) slashes his father’s oil portrait,
quaffs a handy draught of poison and dies in hideous convulsions.
Newsome and Morache struggle bravely to wring pathos out of this
contrived denouement, but it’s a stretch. Nevertheless, in its Ashland
incarnation, Edgar’s play delivers way more than a penny-dreadful’s
worth of dramatic impact and thematic import.
Labels: Reviews
"King John" at Ashland
*“Borrow’d Majesty”*/Play Review/: “King John,” /by William Shakespeare, at the New Theater,
//Oregon// Shakespeare Festival (OSF), //Ashland//./
At four centuries’ distance, we in our time stand about as far removed
from Shakespeare as Elizabethans were from the events detailed in /“King
John.”/ Yet, thanks to the psychological insight of Shakespeare’s script
and the ingenuity of director John Sipes’ Ashland production, the tale
remains as wickedly pertinent today as it must have been in the 1590’s.
The title character (played by OSF veteran Michael Elich) is an
all-too-familiar figure: a usurping, incompetent, unprincipled ruler who
tries to shore up his dubious legitimacy by plunging the world into
open-ended warfare.
After initial success, the tide of battle turns against King John. His
subjects desert him as “collateral damage” mounts unconscionably. Elich
invests his role with far more dignity and depth than ever evinced by
our contemporary commander-in-chief, but the overall storyline remains
painfully familiar.
With this play/ /Sipes makes his Ashland directorial debut/ /after more
than a decade overseeing “movement and fight” for 91 OSF productions.
This background shows; his taut stage blocking makes full use of the
intimate, theater-in-the-round setting, infusing even diplomatic
colloquies with all the tension of a cockfight.
Such skill comes in handy, for there’s a lot more parlaying than onstage
fighting in the world of “/King John.”/ In those days, as in our own,
the backroom pacts and spats of a few vainglorious, hip-shooting
“deciders” could send unseen thousands – or millions – to their deaths.
To underscore these ironies, designers William Bloodgood, Sigeru Yaji
and Alexander Nichols (responsible, respectively, for set, costumes and
lighting) trick out the play in World War I décor. They intercut
cyclorama projections of appalling carnage with the strutting and
preening of popinjays in epaulettes.
In the conclaves of power, the steeliest players turn out to be the
women. The King’s redoubtable mother (Jeanne Paulsen) squares off
against his sister-in-law (Robynn Rodriguez), who – with French backing
– promotes her teen-aged son as true heir to the English crown. Their
shrill bitchiness contrasts with the sweet innocence of the young prince
whose succession claim triggers all the fighting. Teen actress Emma
Harding, in the role, is even frock-coated to evoke the winsome Little
Prince of Saint Exupery’s famous children’s fable.
King John captures his juvenile rival on the battlefield and “renders”
him to a covert prison to be tortured to death. But even John’s
designated henchman (Armando Duran) finds himself, after a wrenching
soul-search, unable to do the bloody deed; he secretly spares the child.
Duran projects a gruff, proletarian humanity – a blessed contrast to all
the amoral blue bloods on stage.
Despite this last-minute reprieve, the boy dies in an escape attempt.
His mother’s towering grief elevates her from a self-promoting harpy to
a dignified symbol of all wartime bereavement. Rodriguez rises to the
occasion in her famous mourning scene: “I am not mad. I would to heaven
I were…Grief fills the room up of my absent child…Then have I reason to
be fond of grief.”
The main target of these imprecations is a conniving papal nuncio who
skillfully fans the flames of war to Vatican advantage. Derrick Weedon
renders this role with his usual silken snarkiness. In his unholy
amalgam of crass realpolitik and ideological zeal, this cardinal would
feel right at home in a K Street think tank – or a Tora Bora cave.
The cardinal’s cool calculation is juxtaposed against the hot
impetuosity of King John’s illegitimate nephew and staunchest
lieutenant, played with burning intensity by Rene Millan. This
personage, known simply as The Bastard, is a pure dramatic invention,
the only role in the play without any precedent in historic fact.
Nevertheless, Shakespeare elevates him to the status of a virtual
co-star, by far the most incisive – and decisive – character onstage.
We first meet him as a plaintiff in a probate case; raised as a country
squire, he’s cut out of his putative father’s will on grounds of dubious
paternity. At King John’s urging, The Bastard opts to renounce his petty
estate and embrace instead his illegitimacy as the out-of-wedlock son of
the late King Richard the Lion-hearted.
As a free-booting soldier-of-fortune, The Bastard finds himself among
the aristocratic high command but never quite one of them. This makes
him an ideal proxy observer on behalf of us, the audience; sort of like
an independent journalist who’s somehow got himself “embedded” in the
heart of CentCom.
At first The Bastard’s star-struck, thrilled to find himself in
“worshipful society, [as] fits a mounting spirit like myself.” But he
soon becomes disillusioned with his new-found playmates’ over-eagerness
to sell out their stated principles for the sake of personal or tactical
advantage (or “commodity,” as it is called in Elizabethan parlance).
He rails against “that purpose-changer, that sly devil…That smooth-fac’d
gentleman, tickling commodity.” Yet he resolves that “Since kings break
faith upon commodity/Gain be my lord, for I will worship thee.” But even
this cynicism gives way when confronted with the abyss of royal
skullduggery. The Bastard pronounces himself “amazed…among the thorns
and dangers of this world.”
John dies, poisoned, and the royal forces, under The Bastard’s command,
lie in rout. In the fog of war, though, the French misread the situation
and retreat, offering a truce. Through no fault of its own, England is
spared an invasion. The Bastard hails this equivocal outcome with a line
oft-cited by jingoists ever since: “Naught can make us rue/If England to
itself do rest but true.”
Any flag-waver who finds this edifying has simply not been paying
attention. In context, the quote is a suitably bleak punchline for a
thoroughly sordid parable.
Still, it may be the best available exit strategy for a quagmire war:
simply declare victory and get out before your adversary can transform
you into something other than yourself, which would be the worst defeat
of all. After the cynical depredations “borrow’d majesty,” it may be
that “commodity” is about the best one can do.
Labels: Reviews
Getting Warm?
Gore's "Truth" Shall Make Ye Free/Movie Review:/ “An Inconvenient Truth,” /Paramount Pictures, at Trinity
Theater. /
Despite the offer of free popcorn to all who attended, Al Gore’s
documentary on global warming drew only sparse audiences during its
week-long run here. Well, what can you expect with a title like that?
Hard to say which word – “inconvenient” or “truth” – would be more of a
turn-off to summer block-buster crowds.
As theater managers Ken and Ann Hill were spooling up the film for its
Weaverville debut matinee, CDF dispatchers were broadcasting first
reports of last week’s Junction Fire. By opening night, the theater –
along with much of the rest of town – had to be evacuated. Even after
the “all clear” signal the following day, “people just had too much on
their minds, what with the fire and all, to come out for a movie like
this,” as Ann Hill charitably interpreted the low attendance.
If so, then Weavervillians were simply learning, by a different medium,
the same inconvenient truths that Gore is trying to tell us, namely:
o global warming is incontrovertibly real
o it is already wreaking havoc right here, right now
o our lifestyle and policy choices do affect the long-term
macro-climate, and
o ignoring the problem only makes the mayhem worse.
Lest there be any doubt that this is the clear message of the ongoing
increase in wildfires throughout the county and all over the American
West in recent decades, check out the latest paper on the subject in the
top-tier academic journal /Science./ The number of fires has quadrupled
in the last 30 years, with 2005 the worst fire season to date, a record
that looks likely to be overturned this year. The research, jointly
sponsored by Federal and California state agencies, found that rising
temperatures (with concomitantly longer fire seasons and drier fuels)
account for far more of the increased wildfire damage than such other
contributory factors as land-use patterns or fire management practices.
What makes this sort of truth all the more inconvenient is that it’s a
little subtler and trickier to understand than a straightforward,
mechanistic cause-and-effect story. It’s a statistical inference, which
is how science proceeds – and also how Gore proceeds in his film. Much
to his credit, he never pretends to make more than a probabilistic case.
But he builds that case meticulously and compellingly. He pulls no
punches and never talks down to us. At the same time, he does everything
he can – with humor, anecdotes, graphs, pictures and ingenious
animations – to make the evidence intuitively accessible to all.
Especially effective are the segments explaining how an effect like ice
cap shrinkage can accelerate as a self-reinforcing vicious cycle.
For someone derided as a stiff in the 2,000 presidential campaign, the
new, cinematic Gore comes off as relaxed and natural, even warm and
witty. Could it be that he was never really such a geek to begin with?
Or has he ripened during his long sojourn in the political wilderness?
Or maybe now that he’s not a candidate or a party standard-bearer
anymore, he no longer needs to hedge and triangulate on a whole gamut of
questions. At last he’s free of his handlers, free to home in on one
issue that he passionately cares about and to speak out in his own
eloquent and urgent voice.
The urgency is spurred by the incalculable downside of continued
American inaction on the climate crisis. Gore debunks the pretense that
there remains any controversy about the dangers of global warming, at
least in informed opinion (as opposed to the special pleadings of vested
interests). He also refutes the claim that the problem’s so vast that
there’s nothing we can do about it. He lists an array of realistic steps
that can be taken to mitigate the worst effects: everything from
stricter vehicle and powerplant emission standards to massive reforestation.
None of this sounds easy, but – given the appalling alternative – how
can we afford to ignore any available remedies? Unless, of course, you
believe the world is immanently about to end. In which case, you deserve
no say-so in public policy debates since you have no stake in any
earthly future, which is, after all, what public policy is all about.
As Gore points out in his final, ringing, call to action, we already
have in hand a range of options to considerably mitigate the dangers.
All that is needed is the political will. “And in America,” he adds,
“political will is a renewable resource.”
I wish I could share his touching faith. But, since Gore has been
idealistic enough to make such a fervent plea, I guess the least I can
do is to suspend my disbelief long enough to write this review. Maybe
/The Journal/ will even make bold to print it.
“/An Inconvenient Truth/” serves as (yet another) wake up call to
anybody out there who cares to hear. It’s also a poignant reminder of
the caliber of leadership we might have had instead of our current
Bozo-in Chief. How, on the climate crisis as on so many other global
issues, have we become the nub of the world’s problem rather than a
leader towards solutions?
Labels: Reviews
Tennessee Williams @ Berkeley Rep
*/Menagerie à Trois/*/Play Review: /“The Glass Menagerie,” /by Tennessee Williams at the
Berkeley Repertory Theater./
In this frankly autobiographical classic, we're treated to the spectacle
of young Tom Wingfield (Williams' thinly veiled alter ego) turning
himself from a hen-pecked, working-stiff Momma's Boy into a writer.
Not just a run-of-the-mill hack writer, mind you, but a dramatic genius
of unparalleled poetic power. Nobody onstage, of course, knows that's
where Williams is headed, but we do in the audience: the masterpiece
before us is proof enough. Ironic that it should come at the price of
all the human wreckage the play depicts.
For in the process of finding his voice, the budding writer has to
forsake two women who entrap him. He shares a threadbare Saint Louis
flat with his painfully retiring sister, Laura, and his flamboyantly
domineering mother, Amanda. Against the backdrop of the Great
Depression, their menage of hand-to-mouth respectability depends
entirely on Tom's meager wage as a warehouseman.
Williams, in his title, likens this three-beast zoo to a collection of
glass animals (Laura's hobby). It's meant as a metaphor of fragility,
but it also conveys a sense of transparency. We see right through all
three protagonists; they're rendered with an honesty that is
crystal-clear, yet full of sympathy.
And, as a testimony to Williams' integrity as a writer, the most
sympathetic portrait of all is of his number one nemesis, his mother.
She's a man-eating magnolia, a Mississippi belle uneasily transplanted
to the urban Midwest. Abandoned by her feckless charmer of a husband,
she soldiers on single-mothering of her two past-prime adult children.
For Amanda, “maintaining standards” is not just a matter of making ends
meet, materially. It's all about manners and – especially – diction. By
turns wheedling, sarcastic or elegiac, she's an eloquent apotheosis of
passive aggression.
Rita Moreno milks the role for all it's worth. She's come a long way
from her dewy portrayal of the teenage Maria in the 1961 film version of
West Side Story. As the sexagenarian Amanda, she projects a sagging
world-weariness precariously propped up by a combination of desperation
and fierce dignity.
Yet, for all her self-imposed stress, the character is also richly
comic. Hard-up as she is, Amanda finds herself constantly forced to
stitch silk purses out of sows' ears. Her yearning for genteel
conventionality propels her to non-stop zany improvisation, a paradox
that Moreno exploits with idiosyncratic speech rhythms and body
language. For sheer intensity, no-one can out-riff her.
Except, perhaps, for Tom, who in self-defense has had to invent his own
arsenal of verbal weaponry. Surly and oafish until provoked, he can
instantly launch into flights of innuendo, raging tirades, sly seduction
or lyrical nostalgia. Erik Lochtefeld plays him as a hair-triggered land
mine of a man, tight-packed with surprises that draw blood.
The verbal violence of the mother-and-son warfare drives Laura ever
deeper into her autistic foxhole. Emily Donahoe well captures the
crippling pathology of the character, but also the underlying sweetness.
Whenever her perennial pout gives way to a sidelong, pickerel smile, it
fleetingly lights up the stage.
She is the keeper of the menagerie; her vulnerability is what holds the
others in thrall. Until Laura can find some way to face the outside
world, her mother has to maintain the cocoon of the tawdry little
apartment and her brother has to keep pulling a paycheck.
Amanda's cotillion background has taught her that the acceptable way for
a well-bred belle to broach society-at-large is through a parade of
suitors. So she nags Tom to line up a “gentleman caller” for Laura. At
length, he produces one: a once-glamorous high school athlete now
reduced to the status of a management trainee at the warehouse.
Terrence Riordan plays the hapless caller as a brisk glad-hander, fresh
out of Toastmaster training. In his manic boosterism, he nearly
surprises himself into seeing Laura's hidden beauty, and she briefly
blossoms under his fleeting glance.
But then he recollects his “real” life – the management ladder, the
night school self-improvement classes, the fiancée – and smilingly bows
himself out of the Wingfield world. Which implicitly shatters the
menagerie and wins Tom his costly freedom.
All this is seen through a glass darkly, in the rear-view mirror of
Tom's memory. From time to time, he stands apart from the onstage action
to address the audience as a narrator, lyrically recalling the story in
retrospect. At these moments, he steps right out of the scene –
literally. He hovers eye-to-eye with the audience, perched on a
steel-grill catwalk that rings the stage.
This levitating effect is just one of the smart innovations director Les
Waters incorporates in his staging. For instance, set designer Scott
Bradley uses translucent glass for the floor of the irregular,
lozenge-shaped apron that represents the apartment. That way, lighting
director Matt Frey can illuminate the actors from below, like strollers
on Redding's own Sundial Bridge, to enhance the dream-like effect.
Such attention to production is right in line with Williams' own vision
of his plays. His scripts are famous for their lengthy stage directions
meticulously spelling out the mood he's trying to achieve. “Memory takes
a lot of poetic license,” he writes when setting the scene for the/
Glass Menagerie./ “It omits some details; others are exaggerated...for
memory sits in the heart. The interior [of the apartment] is therefore
rather dim and poetic.”
This prescription applies as well to Williams' language and storyline as
to his stage set. With these words, he freed himself and a generation of
theatrical successors from the slavish realism of early 20^th century
drama. No wonder this Depression era artifact holds up so well even now.
The play is so well received at the Berkeley Rep that its run has been
extended for an extra month, through July. Not to be missed.
Labels: Reviews
"Ernest" at Ashland
*Of, By and For the Butterflies*“The Importance of Being Ernest,” /by Oscar Wild, //Angus Bowmer
Theater//, //Oregon// Shakespeare Festival, //Ashland//./
Back in the 19^th century, in the decade that proudly styled itself the
“Gay Nineties,” Oscar Wilde was the gayest blade of late Victorian
England. In those days “gay” meant something like merry, or carefree.
And Wilde, without a care for political correctness, merrily mocked his
own upper-crust audiences in London’s West End.
He specialized deadpan epigrams, like “patriotism is the virtue of the
vicious,” or “always forgive your enemies – nothing annoys them so
much.” /The Importance of Being Ernest/ piles such quips one after
another for nearly two hours, all tied together with just the thinnest
wisp of plot:
Two moneyed fops, Jack and Algernon, have each dreamt up imaginary
dependents to wriggle out of spending too much “face-time” with their
prim, female relatives. Jack has invented a wastrel brother, Ernest,
who’s always having to be bailed out of trouble in London. That way,
Jack gets to hang out in town with Algernon, leaving his young ward,
Cecily, back in their country house under the grim guardianship of a
sourpuss governess, Miss Prism.
In London, passing himself off as Ernest, Jack falls for Algernon’s
cousin, Gwendolen. She’s equally smitten with him, but the girl’s
mother, Algernon’s snobby Aunt Agatha, will have no part of it – at
least not until the mystery of Jack’s parentage is solved. It seems the
boy was a foundling, abandoned in a suitcase at a railway station and
adopted by a rich, but impulsive, aristocrat.
So daunting is this Aunt Agatha that, in order to escape her endless
tea-parties, Algernon has had to make up an invalid friend who
repeatedly calls him away for urgent deathbed vigils. On this pretext,
he slips out of London to Jack’s country house, where he presents
himself to Cecily as her guardian’s long-lost brother, Ernest. She
determines to reform his wayward ways, even if she has to marry him in
the process.
Algernon’s distaff relatives manage to track him down to Jack’s country
house, where Gwendolen and Cecily discover that they’re both supposedly
engaged to the same feckless Ernest. It all sorts out, though, when Aunt
Agatha forces Miss Prism to confess to a long-suppressed secret – a
comic opera muddle involving swapped luggage in a London railway cloak
room.
The two dandies turn out to be siblings, after all, and both quite
marriage-worthy even by Aunt Agatha’s strict standards. And, as an added
bonus, it so happens that Jack was actually christened at birth with the
coveted name of Ernest (which for some reason sends both girls into swoons).
Precisely because of its insubstantial plot, /The Importance of Being
Ernest/ is not an easy play to produce. Like an airy soufflé, its
success largely depends upon exact timing. Actors have to be snappy
enough in their delivery to get across the gag lines, yet measured
enough to convey Wilde’s clever turns of phrase. The entire cast manages
this judicious balance in the new Ashland production, thanks to director
Peter Amster’s fine-tuned sense of pace.
Even the scene shifts require hair-trigger precision so as not to
interrupt the flow of banter. Ashland’s resident set designer, William
Bloodgood, makes full use of the theater’s sophisticated revolving-stage
machinery. For good measure, he goes so far as to dress his legions of
stage hands in tux-and-tails butler suits to fit in with the fussy,
Victorian décor.
But it falls to an actual stage butler – Geoffery Blaisdell as
Algernon’s servant, Lane – to set the ironic tone of the play in the
very first scene. He’s alone onstage as the lights come up, laying the
table for afternoon tea. Music drifts in from offstage, where Algernon
is doodling around on a piano. When the music cycles from a classical
sonata to a music hall can-can and back, the butler’s entire body
language changes, even as his face remains impassively discreet – a
show-stealing moment, no mean feat for a pantomime in such a verbal play.
Still, the main speaking roles earn their due share of kudos, too. You’d
think the leading players were deliberately cast in contrasting pairs,
so neatly do they offset each other. Jeff Cummings’ lanky, priggish Jack
makes an ideal straight man for Kevin Kenerly’s sly and florid Algernon.
Heather Robison’s citified coquetry as Gwendolen seems a far cry from
Julie Oda’s artlessly perky Cecily, yet each holds her own when they
square off for a smilingly bitchy catfight. And Dee Maaske, as the
passive-aggressive Miss Prism, proves more than a match for the
dominatrix Aunt Agatha, here played by Judith Marie Bergan with just the
right mix of haughtiness and venality.
None of these exactly qualify as in-depth characterizations. But their
very shallowness – and that of the London aristocracy they represent –
is precisely Wilde’s point in this play, to the extent that he has any.
He himself characterized /The Importance of Being Ernest/ as an
entertainment “written by a butterfly for butterflies.”
Maybe that explains the characters’ exclusive preoccupation with only
the most superficial levels of reality – dress and manners and public
piety and gossip. Jack and Algernon declare their love for their
respective ladies, but they really show much more passion about cucumber
sandwiches and tea cakes. And the girls are much more concerned that
their men be /named/ Ernest than that they /be/ earnest.
There is an underlying philosophy at work here, which Wilde –
characteristically – sums up in a one-line epigram: “treat all the
trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of
life with sincere and studied triviality.”
Not that these people are exactly immoral. It’s just that moral
questions have yet to arise for them, nor is there any reason to expect
they ever will. They live in a permanent state of infantile innocence.
No wonder this script is such a perennial favorite among school drama
groups even – or perhaps especially – in our own times.
Labels: Reviews
