A Word In Edgewise: The Importance of Seeing ‘Earnest’

Google Wilde’s glorious confection, and you’ll find a myriad ways to parse it: SparkNotes, CliffNotes, LitCharts, OwlCation, and perhaps the most telling, EssayPro, all eager to help. There’s socially, politically, morally, a gender Gordian knot, how to use the lovers’ bon mots to predict their futures.. My personal advice is: heed the playwright’s subtitle, “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People.” 

Consider what the Guthrie offered you–what balm in Gilead during these “world is too much with us” days–a few hours immersion in silliness, love (however fleeting), and pure fun. Don’t get me wrong–it takes a lot to give “Silly” its capital “S.” P.G. Wodehouse needed double-digit rewrites to raise Bertie Wooster to the acme of looniness. Bertie was the Master’s work and Earnest is Wilde’s. Our task was but to enjoy.

Director David Ivers & Co. did some salutary tinkering as well; the original Wildean time was bumped from Victorian 1895 to a looser–in mores and couture­–to 1905, leaving the players still in “antique” dress but clothing more suitable to the current athletic staging, and under a somewhat more louche monarch and mores.

We met John “Jack” Worthing, J.P. and Algernon Moncrief, old pals who maintain doppelgangers – “Earnest” and “Bunbury” respectively–enabling them to slip into–or out of–desired or uncomfortable situations at will. They were enamored of two young ladies, Hon. Gwendolyn Fairfax and Cecily Cardew, the latter under the guardianship of her uncle John (“Jack in the country and Earnest in town”)

The ladies coped in their own fashion. When things seemed to be going down, Gwendolyn assured Jack, “…I may marry someone else, and marry often, nothing [she] can do can alter my eternal devotion to you.” She also avers, “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.”

Through it all, Algernon, for one so languid, was in semi-perpetual motion. Flounce, flop, drape, lurch, pivot, like a gyroscope performing acrobatics while spinning true. Silly to the nth degree, but precise, as comedy must be; his pas de deux with Jack over foodstuffs, notes, addresses were exquisitely timed. As were the ladies’ sparring matches and suggestive (though ladylike) motions for the lads’ delectation.

The original Wilde is funny on the page, but the theater’s flesh-and-blood impetus, the Chaplin-roller-skating-along-the-abyss thrill of near disaster, put this production over the top and kept the viewer gasping, all achieved with props as mundane as surfeits of teatime sugar cubes and the competitive devouring of muffins– carbohydrates more hilarious, more laugh-packed than General Mills ever dreamed. 

Butler Merriman, and Manservant Lane maintain deadpan ballast for the ship:

   Algernon: I hope tomorrow will be a fine day, Lane.

   Lane: It never is, Sir.

   Algernon: Lane, you’re the perfect pessimist.

   Lane: I do my best to give satisfaction, Sir.

They’ve seen it all and often. One imagined them in the midnight hours penning picaresque novels from copious notes locked in valises (like Miss Prism’s three-novel manuscripts wrapped in a blanket in that perambulator abandoned decades ago after checking the baby in her capacious handbag at Victoria Station. Brighton line.

Lady Bracknell’s gimlet eye and Himalayan hauteur, the pivotal Miss Gimlet of the 3-volume novel, and the heretofore unsnagged Reverend Canon Chasuble were each well-honed gem-works in this, Wide’s ever-accurate time piece.

You can dissect a living creature down to the marrow without producing something to flourish on a tray in the drawing room. Whatever the Guthrie hath wrought in its fourth iteration of Earnest, they delivered it up brand-spanking-new for your pleasure. 

The show ran at the Guthrie’s Wurtle Thrust, closing October 15.