Word: earnestness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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OSCAR WILDE'S witty dialogue is the only saving grace in the Boston Shakespeare Company's production of The Importance of Being Earnest. From Algernon Moncrief's description of the practice of "bunburrying" in the first scene to his statement in the last that "style, not sincerity, is the vital thing," all entertainment value comes from Wilde himself and not from the actors' plastic performances...
Poor acting and stage directions are occasionally forgotten because of the extreme humor of the dialogue. But the actual women in The Importance of Being Earnest, Riggs and Worthing's "excessively pretty 18-year-old ward" Cecily Cardew (Melinda McNavy), act like two adolescents in love for the first time. After Cardew leaves Algernon, whom she has just met, she says deridingly that "a momentary separation from someone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable." But their costumes are distasteful and their overly innocent manners crush Wilde's lines to triteness...
Instead they present the "Nam straightforwardly, flatly, through Charlie Company's eyes. The writing is intentionally crude, almost comically earnest. Goldman and Fuller actually want to make us feel like khaki-clad grunts, humping through the jungle in search of gooks...
...Juliet was set mysteriously and superfluously in modern-day Belfast, and Bill Coe's Memlet offered the truly creative line-reading "To be, or not?... To be!" But now the fever seems to have broken. Caesar, which will run repertory with Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, demonstrates the virtues of an almost lost art: the straight reading. Unaffected period costumes, a simple Roman-looking set, and very alert casting give the audience a secure sense of a play with dynamism and direction...
...meeting of the ruling Politburo, as has been the custom recently, a possible indication that the gathering had been called off. But it was only after Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov returned to Moscow after an unusually short, 24-hour visit to Budapest last week that the speculation began in earnest...