Delightfully Wilde

OSCAR WILDE'S MASTERPIECE "The Importance of Being Ernest" is as self-conscious a piece of fluff as ever there was. The play, indeed, is full of references to its own triviality. When one character advises another, "In matters of grave importance, style not sincerity is the vital thing," she could be talking about Wilde's own philosophy.

What counts here, of course, is not what's said but how it's said. With such a fine line separating art from reality, the success of the show depends upon the actors' ability to sustain appropriate distance from the audience and from the humor of their lines. The moment an actor shows he is conscious of the absurdity of what he's saying, the delicate veil shatters and the play falls flat. With only a few setbacks, the Dunster House production of "The Importance of Being Ernest" presents a delightfully self-contained and poker-faced version of Wilde's drawing room satire.

As the title suggests, the plot centers around the name Ernest and the troubles which arise when Jack, a young country gentleman of dubious origin, invents a rakish, city-dwelling brother named Ernest whose escapades provide him with an excuse to venture to London. Similarly, Jack's friend, Algernon, has invented a sickly friend, Bonburry, whose continual illnesses provide him, Algernon, with a reason to avoid dinners with his stuffy aunt, Lady Bracknel. It all gets messy when both Algernon and Jack fall in love with women who insist they can only marry men named Ernest.

THIS COMPLEX comedy of errors, however, is only an excuse for Wilde to poke fun at everything from English domestic life to French drama. Indeed, the structure of the play is a satire of the traditional English pastoral in which the degeneracy of the town is contrasted with the heightened, magical world of uncorrupted beauty found in the country.

In Wilde's version, however, the country is every bit as artificial as London town itself. By layering irony upon irony, Wilde gives dimension to what would otherwise be rather simplistic humor and saves the piece from mere triviality.

No production can catch all of Wilde's humor. But this production does an admirable job of highlighting as much as possible. The timing, thanks to Director John Wauck, is superb, as the actors jump from one-liner to one-liner. Though the cast is consistently good, Chris Charron's, imperturbable Algernon and Valerie Gilbert's haughty Lady Bracknel steal the show.

Charron is as agile with his tongue as with his feet as he jumps lightly around the stage in search of the perfect muffin. "I hate people who are not serious about meals," he says blithely, stuffing yet another cucumber sandwich in his mouth. The success of Charron's performance is that he does hate people who are not serious about food; he does, in fact, worry about tea. Not for a second does he realize the humor of his situation, Bravo.

Paolo Carozza's Ernest, by contrast, lacks some of the necessary dash. Whether this is inherent in the part or not, he is, unfortunately, upstaged by Algernon. As Jack's beloved Gwendolyn, Anne Higgins is marvelously coy, delivering her studied and empty superlatives with necessary aplomb.

Wauck has also devised simple and effective sets which suggest the fragility of the superficial English society. Although most of the costumes are nattily effective, Gwendolyn's wig makes her look more like a Muppet then a bombshell, and Algernon's disguise as Jack's devilish brother Ernest looks more like a recent arrival from Palm Beach.

Wilde's wordiness can easily drag, but the cast and crew have done a magnificent job of saving the play from this pitfall. Their sharp, concise style is true to Wilde's genius of conveying "What oft was said but ne'er so well expressed."