Accents overshadow acting in ‘Earnest’
The CSC Theatre production of Oscar Wilde’s infamously funny play, “The Importance of Being Earnest,” is an admirable effort.
The cast is quite well practiced in their lines and marks, and the sets are beautiful. The myriad of interesting visuals is this production’s strength.
Shannon Smay, senior of Sidney, is the picture of the conniving Algernon. Amanda Pintore, senior of Omaha, is a spot-on batty-but-attendant Miss Prism. And Marty Lastovica, junior of Omaha, should be lauded for the superior beardsmanship that gave way to the enormous muttonchops that adorn his face as protagonist John (Jack) Worthing.
Even Stage Manager, Evan Torkelson, freshman of San Leandro, Calif., a last-minute substitute in the role of Reverend Chasuble, had nothing amiss in his visual performance.
The costumes are another element worth attending to. Forgiving a few anachronisms—were belted suitcoats in vogue in 1895?—the only hitch is the similarity between one character’s dress and a certain wizard of Middle-earth.
Shalee Jones, senior of Minitare, gives a great performance as the staid, respectable, and inexplicably platinum-blond, Lady Bracknell. But the hilarity is transferred from Bracknell’s pronouncements—“You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter—a girl brought up with the utmost care—to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel? Good morning, Mr. Worthing!”—to her floppy hats and the staff that she repeatedly pounds on the floor like Gandalf admonishing a group of hobbits.
Despite strong visual performances, and the attendant visual humor, the play is simply not that funny. This comes as a surprise, given some of the cast members’ histories of smashing comedic performances; (Smay and Pintore were riotously funny in “Godspell”).
“Earnest” is a play at which I’ve always laughed my head off, but this production left me laughing at the wrong things—like Bracknell’s dresses—and scratching my head at the flatly-delivered ironies from Jack and Algernon and the too-practiced obliviousness of Gwendolen, played by Erin Neal, junior of Crawford, and Cecily, played by Asha Martin, freshman of Scottsbluff.
Even Smay and Lastovica fall flat in the comedic timing of their supposed-to-be witty back and forths.
Algernon says, “Please don’t touch the cucumber sandwiches! They are ordered specially for Aunt Augusta.”
“Well, you have been eating them all the time,” Jack says.
Algernon says, “That is quite a different matter. She is my aunt!”
How could that not be funny? And yet it was not.
The production’s problem seems to be in the efforts by all the cast members to be very much British, and particularly Victorian-era British. Their collective attention to their accents is—pardon the “My Fair Lady” reference—all Henry Higgins and no Eliza Doolittle.
“The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain,” should occasionally give way to “In ‘ertford, ‘ereford and ‘ampshire, ‘urricanes ‘ardly ever ‘appen.”
Seeing everyone behave so properly during all the hijinks, and hearing them enunciate so clearly as they volley witty lines at each other sucks the life out of the humor.