Lady Windermere’s Fan

Reviewed by Bill Raden
Chalk Rep at Clark Library, Jefferson Park
Through August 3

Photo: Courtesy of Chalk Repertory Company

Los Angeles might not have invented the dubious summer practice of combining outdoor performance and picnicking (the current best evidence implicates the sixth century BCE Greeks), but it arguably played a role in re-institutionalizing it by inaugurating the L.A. Phil’s “Music Under the Stars” concerts at the Hollywood Bowl in 1922.

That means Chalk Rep, the feisty young company that bills itself as being “dedicated to producing classical and contemporary plays in unconventional spaces,” was rather late in the game when it inaugurated its own annual theater-under-the-sun productions last summer on the grounds of UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library with director Jennifer Chang’s multi-racially cast revival of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan.

With this remount of the drawing room comedy — and Wilde’s first certified commercial hit — Chang reassembles nearly all of her original cast (Jacques C. Smith replaces lone no-show Owiso Odera as this year’s stolid Lord Windermere) and all of her design team to establish a Chalk tradition with a production that faithfully delivers both the unique pleasures and the eccentricities of last year’s effort.

Chief among the former is the Clark Library itself. A 1920s English Baroque gem in the historic heart of the West Adams neighborhood, the former mansion’s terraces, walled gardens and whimsical follies become class-relevant backdrops to the production. The site also serves as an ornamental corollary to the gilded container of 19^th century melodramatic conventions from which Wilde launches his comic assault on the Puritan intolerance of late-Victorian bourgeois respectability.

It’s not always a snug fit. Act I, which Wilde sets in the Windermere “morning room” but which Chang stages on the Clark’s rear patio, is taken up by obligatory exposition as, first, Brian Slaten’s dashingly cynical Lord Darlington, and, then, society gossips Allie Jennings (as the flighty Lady Agatha) and Teri Reeves (delightfully venomous as the Duchess of Berwick), pay calls on Amielynn Abellera’s priggish Lady Windermere, while laying out the playwright’s ideological poles.

Instead of merely restaging the act for outdoors, however, Chang and scenic designer Art Betanzos surreally decorate the terrace with distinctly indoor lamps and furnishings — an inside-out choice suited to a stage adaptation of The Beverly Hillbillies, perhaps, but hardly in character for the rigidly conventional Windermeres.

Act 2’s pivotal ballroom scene, in which Lady Windermere is forced to finally meet Tess Lina’s society-crashing parvenu, the mysterious Mrs. Erlynne, makes a far more comfortable transition to the far end of the Clark’s sunken lawn, to which Chang gives an additional immersive spin by drafting audience members as guests and having them announced by butler/emcee George Wyhinny.

The real rewards of Chang’s production, however, come with the epigrammatic fireworks of Act 3. That’s when Windemere’s twits and halfwits — Feodor Chin as Cecil Graham; Scott Keiji Takeda as Mr. Hopper;Peter Wylie as the Mrs. Erlynne-smitten Lord Augustus; and standout Amin El Gamal as the Decadent dandy Dumby — gather in Darlington’s rooms to let down their hair in a delicious barrage of some of Wilde’s choicest bon mots.

Thanks to authoritative and affecting performances by Lina and Abellera, the play eventually spreads its wings for a perfectly satisfying flight. That it might have soared to the Wildean heights of a more outrageous artifice is suggested by flourishes of inspired wit, such as Lady Windermere’s inventive fan hat, that occasionally come through in Halei Parker’s otherwise restrained, modern-dress costume design.

Chalk Repertory Company at William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2520 Cimarron St., Jefferson Park; Sat.-Sun., 6 p.m.; through Aug. 3. Chalkrep.com