Being there

Foothills proves The Importance of Being Earnest

by Steve Vineberg

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST

By Oscar Wilde. Directed by Peter Bennett. Set designed by Harry Feiner. Costumes by Ted Giammona. Lighting by Joe Saint. With Steve Dane, Matthew Amory, Kathleen Huber, Jennifer DiBella, Charlotte Anne Dore, Margery Shaw, Michael G. Dell'Orto, Steven Barkhimer, and Bill Taylor. At Worcester Foothills Theatre, through November 29.

There are few comedies written in English in the same class as Oscar Wilde's 1895 The Importance of Being Earnest -- besides a handful by Shakespeare, perhaps only The Way of the World, The Beggar's Opera, The School for Scandal, The Rivals, She Stoops to Conquer, and What the Butler Saw -- and none surpasses it. Wilde wrote it at the height of his career, after he'd lost interest in those strange combinations of comedy of manners and melodrama (like Lady Windermere's Fan and An Ideal Husband) that make up most of his dramatic output, and after his symbolist drama Salome, banned by the English censors, had been performed in Paris under the auspices of Sarah Bernhardt. And shortly after Earnest was produced for the first time (it was a triumph from the outset), Wilde sued Lord Queensbury unsuccessfully for libel and got sent to prison for sodomy, so it was also the last of his plays.

Earnest is a satire of Victorian manners that's handily survived its target. The two heroes, Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, lead (harmless) double lives. They've invented characters -- a brother for Jack, a friend named Bunbury for Algernon -- to carry them away from London when they want relief from society and to draw them back home when they've had enough of the country or the continent. This premise is the perfect comic reflection of the bizarre dichotomy in Victorian male behavior (domestic respectability on the one hand, sexual excess on the other). And the insistence of the two women in their lives, Gwendolen Fairfax (Algy's cousin and Jack's beloved) and Cecily Cardew (Jack's ward and the object of Algy's affection), on being courted only by men named Ernest is a hilarious metaphor for aristocratic superficiality. But audiences love Earnest not for its velvet-gloved barbs at Victorian sensibility, but for the language and the lunacy.

Productions of the play always bring tremendous pleasure to audiences, and I'm sure that will be the case with Peter Bennett's for Foothills. It's a mid-range revival, though -- far from terrible, far from inspired. When you first walk in and see the set Harry Feiner's designed for Algernon's morning-room, a fantastical environment with rugs and blankets in desert colors hung like canopies, your hopes rise: Feiner has created the kind of room Wilde himself would have delighted in occupying. But the opening exchange, between Algernon (Matthew Amory) and Jack (Steve Dane), is a letdown. It's awkwardly staged and Amory appears amateurish -- he can't seem to figure out what to do with his hands. The evening picks up with the arrival of Kathleen Huber's Lady Bracknell, with her niece Gwendolen (Jennifer DiBella) in tow, but by that point you've almost forgotten Feiner's visual inventiveness, because Bennett doesn't offer any concept to address it; besides, the second-act country-garden set is, disappointingly, quite conventional.

Except for Amory, the cast is clearly talented, though they don't all perform with equal success. Kathleen Huber, decked out in the best of Ted Giammona's costumes, tosses her head under her plumed hat and enunciates ferociously while maintaining an almost preternatural calm. There are glimpses here of Edith Evans's celebrated Lady Bracknell (preserved in the glorious 1956 British movie version) in Huber's; they act as touchstones. But the performance is her own, and she's very, very good. As Miss Prism, the dotty rural governess with the checkered past, Margery Shaw acts with her jawbone and is amusingly eccentric; in the role of the fatuous country parson, Chasuble, Prism's unlikely swain, Michael G. Dell'Orto is absurdly lanky and frail. They're a clever match. Steve Dane, who has Jeremy Irons looks, is perfectly adequate, if not memorable, as Jack: he reads the lines well and gets his laughs. But not all the actors seem moored. Both DiBella as Gwendolen and Charlotte Anne Dore as Cecily have their moments, but they seem to be trying too hard -- especially Dore, who flits all over the stage. This is obviously a deliberate choice, but it doesn't work. Both these actresses need stronger direction, and also more flattering gowns -- the white and lavender monstrosity DiBella shows up in on her first appearance makes her look like something on a mantelpiece. I did get a kick out of the two manservants, Steve Barkhimer as Lane (chez Moncrieff) and Bill Taylor as Merriman (chez Cardew), though Taylor's amiable mugging isn't in the same style as anyone else's on stage.

The production is crisply paced; playing acts two and three without a break and in the same setting, Bennett brings it in at two hours. The elegantly preposterous one-liners are as marvelous as ever. But the show suffers from a kind of pallor, as if Wilde had been somehow converted to respectability. Except for the Sahara romanticism of the first-act designs, this Earnest just isn't outrageous enough.