Word: earnest
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When King Kalakaua-the "Merry Monarch,'' elected by the legislature two years after the end of the Kamehameha dynasty-ratified a reciprocal trade treaty with the U.S. in 1875, Hawaii boomed in earnest. But then, embroiled with a corrupt legislature and a Svengali-like adventurer, Kalakaua lost his grip; scandals raged as the spendthrift King kicked the public debt from $388,000 to $2,600,000 until, in 1887, he was forced to sign a new constitution stripping himself of his near-totalitarian powers...
Raisin might be somber, or merely sentimental, if its milieu were not so sharply observed, its speech so flavorful, and its infectious sense of fun so caustic. Much of the laughter wells up around Beneatha, a girl of earnest intellectual fads. When a Nigerian boy friend introduces her to a bit of African lore, she promptly decks herself out as "the queen of the Nile," and whirls across the room to click off a jazz program ("Enough of this assimilationist junk...
Style, style is the one thing needful for Earnest, and the Rep's actors can provide it only intermittently. In this most artificial of comedies the actors must look and sound as if they lived in the world of the play, not as if they were assuming certain mannerisms as they came out of the wings. They must give the impression that elaborate epigrams and elegant pseudo-nonsense are as natural to them as "Please pass the ketchup" and "Aw, go---yourself" are to us. Any gesture or inflection that seems as if it is there for its own sake...
...Earnest is a comedy of manners--not a duplication but certainly a parody of the manners of Society in the English 1890's. Its characters are frequently rude on purpose, never by accident; they often exhibit bad manners, but it is impossible to conceive of their having no manners--unless, evidently, you are Stephen Aaron, who directed this production. Mr. Aaron: a gentleman never sits while a lady is standing, especially if the lady is a Lady, and no less if "she is a monster, without being a myth, which is rather unfair." Moreover, a fashionable young...
Webster Lithgow, whose arrangement of the bare stage for Six Characters was unobtrusively correct and atmospherically grubby, has under-estimated the need for Victorian naturalism in the settings for Earnest, which should never be designed by anyone but Cecil Beaton. The play is very carefully related to its background in life--Wilde even knows the address of John Worthing's town house. (Fen Lasell's formidable costumes are much more in the vein, because they appear impeccably "period...