"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
