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Review: Woodford Theater’s 'Earnest' is a Wilde night

By Candace Chaney Contributing Theater Critic

VERSAILLES — The newly christened Woodford Theater, formerly the Woodford County Theatrical Arts Association, opens its 2009-10 season with a Victorian flourish and an homage to one of the wittiest, and most infamous, playwrights of all time.

Beth Kirchner directs The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscare Wilde’s famous farce poking fun at the very London high society circles he himself frequented. Full of ribald characters with vacuous motives, the hallmark of the show is Wilde’s unapologetic, lavish play with language, a linguistically Victorian aspect of the play Kirchner hopes to translate to modern audiences. Her director’s notes lament our culture’s atrophy of language; she points to the theater as a vehicle for preserving the “art form of conversation.”

Nine actors prove more or less up to Kirchner’s lofty task. At evident at Saturday night’s performance, they largely wield the language to potently comedic effect, but a few times, the language wields them, causing them to fall into the trap of caricature over character. These instances do little to disrupt the overall flow and fun of the show, but do prevent the ensemble effort from reaching its highest level of accomplishment.

Set alternately between London and an English country manor in 1895, the play follows Algernon and Jack, a pair of high society bachelors fond of “Bunburying,” Algernon’s term for adopting an alter ego to freely adventure outside London. Bunbury is Algernon’s fake name, while Jack admits to pretending to be Earnest in the city and Jack in the country. Enter a beautiful young girl of marrying age intent on wedding a man named Earnest; her domineering mother; and another beautiful girl intent on marrying a man named Earnest. With that combination, you have a plot ripe for hijinks, confused identities and social parody.

Chris Williams’ Jack is refreshingly drawn and makes some interesting choices that pay off in laughs, like his hilarious mini-breakdown while asking the vicar (played with subtle panache by John Broderick Lynaugh) to re-christen him as “Earnest.” Ryan Briggs is largely responsible for the delivery of the bulk of the play’s most famous satiric lines, lines like, “The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous.” Replete with the ostentatious dress of a dandy, Briggs is sufficiently Wildean as Algernon but occasionally fails to connect with the audience as well as other cast members, perhaps out of his character’s perceived intellectual aloofness and commitment to utter foppishness.

While the male duo sets the plot in motion, it is the female characters who bring real color and vivacity to the show, both in costumer J. Darrell Maines’ jewel-toned frocks and the relish with which they embrace Wilde’s hyperbolic parody of high society women. Gina Scott-Lynaugh is tyrannically haughty, wretchedly domineering and love-to-hate-her loathsome as Lady Bracknell. And Dara Jade Tiller and Christina Ritter nail passive-aggressive faux formality when their characters, Gwendolen and Cecily, discover they are rival fiancées to Earnest.

Kirchner teamed up with her lighting designer, W. Todd Pickett, to design the set, an impressive revolving stage that drew a few gasps when a surprised audience saw the first rotation.

Speaking of the audience, the Saturday night crowd I was a part of did not react much to the funnier moments in the script. The first laugh-out-loud moment came not after one of Wilde’s famously wry, sardonic quips, but only after one of the main characters sat on top of another one in a bit of injected slapstick, indicating that despite Kirchner’s best efforts, the audience just may not be that into 19th-century period pieces. Audience speculation aside, the show remains solid, fun, and most important, Wilde.