The Rude Mechanicals present
by Oscar Wilde
Directed by Jaki Demarest and Produced by Joshua Engel
The
Importance of Being Earnest
was the last and greatest of Wilde's finished plays, a triumph produced
a few short months before he was put on the most sensational and humiliating
trial of the Victorian Era, and convicted of Gross Indecency.
Earnest remains, just over a hundred years later, one of the greatest
comedies in the English language, a darkly and deliciously subversive
little piece, flooded with all the homoerotic imagery and subtext you'd
expect from the last and best of the Aesthetic and Decadent writers.
It exists
like a secret code, within and between the words, sharp and teasing
and seductive, for the enjoyment of the gay society that had to remain
so carefully concealed in the margins. Cecily, for example, the
name of Jack Worthing's ward, was a contemporary term for a young male
prostitute. Jack and Algy fight over buttered muffins, apparently
blissfully unaware of all the double entendres for buttocks and lubrication
or the fact that food is such a very obvious symbolic substitute for
sex. And the silver cigarette case they fight over in Act 1 was
a gift Oscar Wilde was known to have given several of his lovers.
One imagines that in the darkness of the audience seats, there were
secret smiles, whispers, the thrill of all things secret and forbidden,
the love that dared not speak its name.
Nor is all
of the subversive imagery given over to the homoerotic. Earnest,
for all its surface simplicity, the meringue lightness of its romantic
plots, is a sharp satire of the strictures of upper class Victorian
society, as they could only have been written by a man who moved in
it with seamless charm, but preferred the earthy company of rent boys
and day laborers. If it is 'an age of ideals,' as Gwendolen Fairfax
describes it, it is also an age of seeming, an age of fundamental insincerity
in which appearances are everything. "He has nothing, but
he looks everything," Bracknell raves of Algy, in defense of his
eligibility to marry. "What more can one desire?"
Indeed, in a society where style is everything and substance is discounted
as unimportant, Algy is quite the perfect husband.
It became
unbearably tempting to lift the play from its Victorian surroundings
and replant it in lavish, decadent 1935 Hollywood, the one place the
Haves still Had in a nation gripped by the Great Depression. Another
age of seeming, in which style was king and glamour was queen.
The hectic heyday of Piet Mondrian, Busby Berkeley, Fred Astaire and
Ginger Rogers, Merle Oberon, Katherine Hepburn, Clark Gable, Bette Davis,
Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, John
Ford, Gertrude Stein and, of course, the omnipresent threat of grinding
poverty just beneath that glittering surface. Everyone looked
to the movies, for entertainment, for a glimpse of a beautiful world
without bread lines, a world of wealth, escape, adventure, true love,
song, dance, sound, and increasingly, color. And the American aristocracy
entrenching itself in the bright lights, glitter and glamour of Tinseltown
had its own strict and bizarre rules to follow, social mores to be upheld,
indentured studio servitude, and, no doubt, 'Bunburying' to be done
when the pressure of towing the line simply got to be too much.
"In matters of great importance, style, not substance, is the vital thing." Earnest is Oscar Wilde at his finest; dry, sparkling, engaging, charming, wooing the audience with impossibly sharp wit and the secret underlying sentiment of a not-so-closet romantic.