Word: gwendolen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...this game of verbal lawn tennis, the two bogus brothers are matched with two demurely saucy maidens. As Cecily Car dew and Gwendolen Fairfax, Kathleen Widdoes and Patricia Conolly lob and volley Wilde's lines with devastating precision. The Fourth of July will be a little early this year. Over Manhattan's Circle in the Square Theater, comic flares light the night...
Bloomfield's task is to create a king of mirror effect through which, for example, the town-bred Gwendolen and countrified Cecily seem merely of vanity and triviality. These are not, after all, three-dimensional characters; they are instead cardboard figures, albeit unusually witty ones, whose motto is "I speak, therefore...
...worst failing of this production is that it violates Oscar Wilde's own "art for art's sake" aesthetic. "In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing," Gwendolen asserts at one point. In this version of Wilde's farce, the latter remains a poor subsitute for the former...
...Wild's lines are virtually actor-proof, bacause in the Leverett House production they need all protection they can get. The problem begins with director Samuel Bloomfield's conception of the play. The two sets of main characters--Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, the spoiled, young dandies, and Gwendolen Fairfax and Cecily Cardew, the vain, young ingenues who wish for beaux named "Earnest"--should appear essntially interchangeable. Otherwise, the contusion of identities in the second act and the symmetry of the romantic pairings at the end make little dramatic sense...
...PRODUCTION of this play which features a Gwendolen who's tougher than her august Aunt Augusta. But if Clapp's ingenue is enough to make a young man's blood run cold, Victoria Allan's Lady Bracknell is strikingly unintimidating. Hers is the best character part in a play filled with nothing but. As the grim dowager symbol of the aristocracy in rout, Allan actually manages to be boring; she plays on the same emotional level throughout, scarcely varying her slow delivery, never rising to farcical peaks of anger or ridiculousness...