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review The Hunger Artists are billing their production of Oscar Wilde's "The Importance Of Being Earnest", currently at their new space in the Santa Ana Artists Village as "the way Oscar would've wanted it." Because Wilde made his last exit nearly a century ago, those of us still here to ponder such proclamations must first wonder, do the liberties director Kelly Flynn has taken with the play -- an all-male cast and a mid-1960s setting -- shed new insight upon Wilde's text or are they merely gimmicks to guffaw over at the play's expense? Just what would ol' Oscar have thought of these goings on, anyway? Overall, I think Mr. Wilde would be amused and approving of what Hunger Artists has done with what is widely considered to be his "masterpiece" of a play. Far from being a gimmick, the single-gender casting seems curiously natural. Even during moments of coyest courtship between the young star-crossed couples, Wilde's male/female exchanges seem apt and oddly proper, bringing out an androgyny usually masked by traditional casting. Even the most radical directorial tangents (manservant Lane in miniskirt and fishnets and a Miss Prism by way of Col. Klink, the latter a hilarious Tom Hensley) integrate effectively into Wilde's pre-absurdist scenario. Despite the temptations such a staging offers, Flynn's production slips only occasionally into frat-house drag show excess. Transporting the setting from mid-1890s to mid-1960s England, however, is less effective. "Earnest" is on the surface an innocuous if amusing farce, an absurdist precursor to the alienation to come in this century from Brecht, Sartre and Beckett. What has sustained this play for 100+ years and made it more than a museum exhibit lies just underneath the vacuous frivolity of the surface. The real strength of "Earnest" lies in its subtext. Each of the players in "Earnest" meet one another wearing masks of deception, facades to conceal their true identity or lack of one. No one in the play is what he or she purports to be. This is truest for Jack and Algernon, both of whom at times claim to be Ernest. To be "Ernest" -- in Wilde's time a code of identity and recognition among gays -- is to live a double life. To look beyond the brittle surface of the play is to look upon Wilde's encrypted treatise on being gay in the increasingly homophobic social climate of 1890s Europe. (Indeed, in an irony too cruel for even Wilde to appreciate, the opening of "Earnest" in 1895 sparked the dispute with the Marquess of Queensberry which would lead ultimiately to Wilde's fall from grace, imprisonment and early death as a "somdomite".) To remove the play from the context of the repressive time from which it sprang and transplant it to the freewheeling, socially accepting climate of "mod" London of the 1960s is to substantially weaken the power of the subtext and dilute the enduring strength of the play. Nevertheless, I admire the collective huevos grandes of Flynn and Company for taking some real chances here. Despite minor early-in-the-run glitches (mostly with lines), this cast is a joy to watch. Besides the aforementioned Tom Hensley, Sean Cox makes a smolderingly hormonal Gwendolen, Eric B. Person squeezes the most out of his dual roles of Lane and Merriman, and Mark Coyan truly shines as Algernon, adroitly delivering great slabs of Wildespeak while almost constantly eating. It is always a pleasure to watch an actor so in command of his craft. Director Flynn, who also portrays a very specific and relatively low-key Lady Bracknell, keeps his charges moving swiftly, bringing the three acts and two intermissions in at just over 2-1/4 hours. |