Earnestness Without Style; 'I Speak, Therefore I Am'

IN THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNETS, the trivial assumes the guise of seriousness: a man's name takes on more significance than his character, a good profile is equated with good principles and the allocation of food--in this case, muffins and cucumber sandwiches--becomes a major social issue. It is therefore not totally inappropriate that in this production Merriman, the manservant, should get the biggest laughs of the night by doing a pretty fair imitation of Lurch from The Addams Family. But it certainly doesn't speak well for the rest of the Leverett House cast, who have at their disposal among the funniest lines, scenes and characters ever sandwiched into three short acts.

Oscar Wild's masterpiece is half-satire and all farce. Its humor is partly topical, rooted in the decadence of the late Victorian aristocracy and gentry. But its farcical underpinnings allow it to date unusually well. Wilde's dialogue abounds in inversion and paradox, in the replacement of the weighty with the insubstantial. His characters talk nonsense with a straight face and flout verbal conventions while remaining always socially correct.

It's a good thing so many of Wild's lines are virtually actor-proof, bacause in the Leverett House production they need all protection they can get. The problem begins with director Samuel Bloomfield's conception of the play. The two sets of main characters--Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, the spoiled, young dandies, and Gwendolen Fairfax and Cecily Cardew, the vain, young ingenues who wish for beaux named "Earnest"--should appear essntially interchangeable. Otherwise, the contusion of identities in the second act and the symmetry of the romantic pairings at the end make little dramatic sense.

Bloomfield's task is to create a king of mirror effect through which, for example, the town-bred Gwendolen and countrified Cecily seem merely of vanity and triviality. These are not, after all, three-dimensional characters; they are instead cardboard figures, albeit unusually witty ones, whose motto is "I speak, therefore I am."

Bloomfield's failure lies in his decision to differentiate too sharply between the two ladies and the two gentlemen. Jon Goerner's Algernon--the best performance among the four leads--is a blatantly effeminate fop whose satirical jabs make him seem downright nasty. Davis Goodman's Jack, on the other hand, appears rather put upon, no better than a straight man to Algernon's wit. Goodman makes the balance still more unequal by his inability to vary sufficiently his intonations and break our of the sing-song which mars his delivery.

The two women are much worse. Elisabeth Bronfen as Cecily simply lacks the control to make of the country ingenue a polished caricature. Her emotional range is too limited, and some of her expressions--like the look of disgust she shoots the men at end of Act II--are absurdly out of character. The humor in Gwndolen's role should stem from her delivery of hard-hearted lines with disarming sweetness. Brooks Clapp totally misinterprets the part, however; icily indifferent, she walks about stiffly with her nose in the air, as though she'd just been starched.

IT'S A SAD PRODUCTION of this play which features a Gwendolen who's tougher than her august Aunt Augusta. But if Clapp's ingenue is enough to make a young man's blood run cold, Victoria Allan's Lady Bracknell is strikingly unintimidating. Hers is the best character part in a play filled with nothing but. As the grim dowager symbol of the aristocracy in rout, Allan actually manages to be boring; she plays on the same emotional level throughout, scarcely varying her slow delivery, never rising to farcical peaks of anger or ridiculousness.

Compare this with the sensitively understated Gilman as prim Miss Prism, Cecily's spinster governess. Severe in a herringbone suit, her frizzy yellow hair drawn back tightly in a bun, Gilman stands in her characteristic pose, hands clasped in front of her, and expresses dismay, skepticism and repressed lust with utter conviction.

Algernon's clipped witticisms and Miss Prism's agonized confrontation with her own carelessness are the two high points of this production. But its real star is Joe Mobilia's sets, whose every detail--from the porcelain tea service to the yellow silk upholstered sofa--elegantly evokes late victorian decadence.

The worst failing of this production is that it violates Oscar Wilde's own "art for art's sake" aesthetic. "In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing," Gwendolen asserts at one point. In this version of Wilde's farce, the latter remains a poor subsitute for the former.