14 July 2012: Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
14 July 2012: Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Matinee. Williamstown Theatre Festival.
I go to all productions of The Importance of Being Earnest with some feelings of trepidation. This latest production, by the Williamstown Theatre Festival, has had wide publicity, and I have known pretty well what I was getting into. This is a “gangster” Earnest. The director, David Hyde Pierce, has made the characters (or most of them, at any rate) into a gang of American Mafiosi who have become expatriates in London. The period is the 1930s. We are invited at the beginning of the play to suspend our incredulity in the interests of great fun.
It is worth the effort. The characters speak in a kind of Damon Runyanesque New York patois, featuring not only “dese dose dem” pronunciations of Wilde’s words but in fact a surprising amount of affinity for the overall style of Wilde’s dialogue. A review in the Boston Globe, enlarged on the wall of the theater foyer, captured the idea: what Damon Runyon’s characters have in common with Oscar Wilde’s characters is that they speak in the same aristocratic, polysyllabic dialogue with which we are already familiar from having read both authors. It is a surprisingly good melding, holding both surprise and delight sustained through the three acts of this lightly cut play. There is a lovely quality of fantasy that shines through, a sense of a carefree life that is to be found only in the precincts of the Runyon story or the Wildean stage. Hyde Pierce adds a complement of line-less actors, including someone called “Big Julie” whose job is to be bodyguard to Lady Bracknell and to frisk any suspicious looking persons such as “Ernest” Worthing. We get the idea.
Most of the actors are good at what they do. Louis Cancelmi’s Algernon is a smart, impeccably dressed up-town man with a faultless Noo Yawk accent and easy, flawless diction. The same cannot quite be said for Glenn Fitzgerald’s John Worthing. The Globe reviewer said he thought Fitzgerald’s Jack was a little out of step with himself, somehow inadvertently expressing the character’s lack of knowledge of who he really is. That notion could be an interesting key-note to the character, but here it seemed Fitzgerald had not quite gotten the hang of it all. He reacts rather than acts. Despite Algy’s identification of him as “one of the most advanced Bunburyists” he has ever seen, Fitzgerald’s Jack lacks Algy’s sophistication, and his diction is less crisp than what is required. Helen Cespedes’s Cecily is winsome yet, like her character, terrifically knowing, able to play the demure card with confidence but always aware of where her next opportunity will come from. And, with her long, dark hair and Mediterranean good looks she is a delightful foil for the bleached blonde Hollywood-coiffured Amy Spanger as Gwendolen and a clear best bet in any contest with the somewhat colorless, over-mothered Spanger, whose character has been imposed on her by the director but not well assimi