25 July 2003: Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
25 July 2003: Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Old Deerfield Productions.
Nowhere on the program is this group identified. The name turns up in the bios. It may be in newspaper advertisements as well. In any case, they are associated with Old Deerfield and performed in a non-proscenium theatre on the grounds of Deerfield Academy. The play is directed by Linda McInerney, longtime organizer of this very pleasant series of plays.
Linda McInerney has done better directing than this, and the cast was notably uneven. The two Equity actors, John Reese as Lady Bracknell and Stephanie Carlson were quite good. The main men, Jack and Algy, played by Michael Fleck and Tristan Chirico, were certainly well contrasted and created credible characters. Rosemary Caine as Miss Prism played a slightly demure version of Rosemary Caine. And Kip Fonsh was atrociously bad as Chasuble — as if he had strayed unaccountably off of the set of a Neil Simon New York comedy and had a nearly ungovernable letch for the governess.
This is shoestring theatre, and it’s unfair to criticize severely. At the same time, this company is capable of some fairly high flights, as in the case of the wonderful, harrowing production two years ago (I believe) of The Cure at Troy, a nearly unbelievable achievement for a group of this modest caliber. In the current instance, what we ended up with was a standard somewhere between mediocre and competent. Setting aside the seeming fact that McInerney was just unable to rein in the gushing, impetuous Kip Fonsh, it remains true that the play achieved a brisk pace and maintained it throughout. (I saw the next-to-last performance; it had been running on long weekends for three or four weeks.) But the nasality of Michael Fleck as Jack was excessive and irritating; does he always talk like that, or is that part of his idea of an English accent? And Fleck’s rapid-fire pace of dialogue, though in principle well intended and in practice successful, resulted in too many nearly inaudible throw-away endings of lines. His body language was approximately right, however, whereas the Algernon’s (Tristan Chirico) was too loose and casual. In a play in which a character — Lady Bracknell — can admonishingly point out that style depends upon the way the chin is worn and “it is worn very high just at present,” it behooves the director to pay attention to such things.
Stephanie Carlson and John Reese did pay attention to such things, and Carlson was “quite perfect” as Gwendolen, playing a fine, sensual, even erotic inner life inside the rigorously correct exterior mercilessly imposed on beautiful young women by fond and doting mothers and by society at large. She hit the spirit of the play and the style of it exactly and was a pleasure to watch whenever she was on stage. John Reese, a tall, big-boned man with a good deep baritone voice, was well up to the challenge of transforming himself into the formidable profile of a grande dame, complete with several pounds of