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The Importance of Being Earnest
Reviewed by Steven Mikulan
A Noise Within
Through Nov. 22
There is a moment at the start of The Importance of Being Earnest when Algernon Moncrieff describes his abilities as a pianist. “I don’t play accurately,” he says. “Anyone can play accurately — but I play with wonderful expression.” That says it all, as far as what a wickedly expressive performance of Oscar Wilde’s great comedy of manners can be onstage — and how Michael Michetti’s well-intentioned but listlessly accurate production at A Noise Within plays out. Michetti is a gifted director but this version of Earnest doesn’t seem to trust its audience’s attention span – galloping through Wilde’s puns and whimsical ruminations when it might be better to linger and savor them. (The play’s three acts run here with a single intermission.)
From the start a chilly physics governs Jeanine A. Ringer’s perfunctory scenic design, which lighting designer Adam Frank floods with an almost antiseptic brightness. These visual choices may stem from the need to make A Noise Within’s thrust stage, which is used in repertory with another production, completely apparent to everyone in this mid-sized house. But the uneasy feeling we come away with is that Wilde’s Victorian farce is being presented here on a morgue slab or inside a museum vitrine.
Wilde’s thin plot might be identified as an early example of a comedy about nothing: London fops Algernon (Adam Haas Hunter) and John Worthing (Christopher Salazar) munch cucumber sandwiches while they both skewer and embody the prejudices and hypocrisies of idle, upper crust society. (“I am sick to death of cleverness,” exclaims Jack, in one of the playwright’s many winks at us.) Females intrude into the men’s afternoons of sandwiches and badinage: Gwendolen Fairfax (Carolyn Ratteray) and Cecily Cardew (Marisa Duchowny) are two young women with crushes on our drawing room warriors, while the acerbic Lady Bracknell (Jean Gilpin) demolishes the piety of their aristocratic milieu by exalting it. What tension exists revolves around how Algernon and John will dispose of the fictitious alter-egos they’ve invented over the years to keep their friends and relatives at arms-length when convenient.
The cast members hit their marks and adequately articulate the play’s celebrated repartee but with few exceptions they don’t revel in Wilde’s subversive epigrams. Gilpin, however, does command our attention as the outrageously opinionated Lady Bracknell; she thoroughly inhabits this arch and unforgettable character whose theatrical descendants include Joe Orton’s Dr. Rance from What the Butler Saw and Tom Stoppard’s Lady Croom in Arcadia. Garry D. Lennon’s costumes provide another saving grace, capturing the dandified excess of an aesthete like Algernon and the full plumage of the cast’s women.
A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena; in repertory through Nov. 22. (626) 356-3100 ext.1. anoisewithin.org
