THE IMPORTANCE OF TRUSTING THE TEXT

7. August 2011 by admin.

F. J. Hartland

In Pittsburgh Irish and Classical Theatre’s (PICT) production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest all the roles are played by men.

The idea of playing fast and loose with gender in Wilde’s play is not new.

Several years ago Pittsburgh’s own Unseem’d Shakespeare did a production where all the roles were cast cross-gendered.

The difference is in the Unseem’d production, director Nona Gerard brilliantly trusted Wilde’s text and had the actors play their roles honestly.  In the PICT production, directed by Conall Morrison, mugging and pratfalls and sex gags are the order of the day, and the men play women like screaming harpies (a la RuPaul’s Drag Race).

The result?

The Unseem’d production was amazing and memorable for all the right reasons. 

The PICT production is memorable, too.  For all the wrong reasons.  Director Morrison reduces Wilde’s script to the level of a bad summer stock production of Natalie Needs a Nightie or Love, Sex and the IRS (and aren’t there enough of those?).

Morrison has also added a prologue to the play (just what a three-act classic needs…to be longer!).  This addition adds nothing really to the production (other than time).  Half of it is spoken in French, so if it wasn’t slow and plodding enough, it’s is also incomprehensible.  (There must have been jokes because I did hear the three people in the audience who spoke French laughing).

Why in the final year of his life is Oscar Wilde—played by Alan Stanford—remembering The Importance of Being Earnest (a play he had written years before)?

Your guess is as good as mine.  This production certainly doesn’t tell us.

The only possible explanation for this prologue is to make the cumbersome set changes required by The Importance of Being Earnest unnecessary. 

But then what does he do?  Morrison adds cumbersome set changes.  The top of Act Two in unbearably slow as we get to watch “gardeners” carry out (and plug in) about 75 lamps.  Really?  Couldn’t that have been done during intermission—and shaved five minutes off this three-hour production?  And yet another set change at 10:25pm?

Matthew Cleaver plays Cecily with a voice that sounds like Miss Piggy.  If this were The Importance of Being The Muppet Show, he’d be perfect!  Will Reynolds’ Gwendolyn is equally cartoonish.  Reynolds already towers over partner David Whalen—and then wears heels?

Leo Marks plays the most annoying Algernon I have ever seen.  And neither he nor David Whalen (Jack) look young enough to play men in their 20’s…not even from the back row of the Charity Randall Theater.

The “women’s” costumes by Joan O’Clery are ghastly. 

Poor James FitzGerald is forced to wear such large mutton sleeves and enormous breasts as Miss Prism that his head looks miniscule.  The effect is like he was a life-sized doll that had a “Barbie” head planted on it.

The only good thing I can say about Sabine Dargent’s shabby set with bad sightlines is that it is so busy, it gives one something to look at when you avert your eyes from this train wreck of a production.

Jim French’s lighting is fine—if you are downstage.  I don’t know if the cast knows they are barely lit when upstage on the platform (or if they move too far stage right or left).

The production is not completely without merit.

David Crawford makes a fine Canon Chausible (but he, too, is forced to mug and have pratfalls by Morrison).

Martin Giles creates a very funny Merrimen—noticeable because it is the only understated performance of the evening.

Legend has it that when Oscar Wilde was dying in his hotel room in Paris, he looked at his window curtains and declared, “Either those drapes go—or I do.”

If he were alive today to see this three-hour monstrosity, perhaps he would say, “Either this production goes—or I do.”

The Importance of Being Earnest runs through August 27.

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