NCT's Earnest crackles with Wilde wit

By LARRY PARNASS, Staff Writer (Daily Hampshire Gazette)

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Wednesday, August 7, 2002 -- NORTHAMPTON - Jack Neary states the New Century Theatre's purpose concisely in a program note for "The Importance of Being Earnest," the Oscar Wilde comedy he's now directing.

Back in 1991, Neary writes, he and Sam Rush set out to provide "good plays performed well for smart audiences."

That's the sort of fast and tight phrasing author Neary builds into his own plays. For the rest of this week, he continues as a director to use the brilliant language in Wilde's last play - and a cast nimble as quicksilver - to spritz audiences with wit.

It's a good play, yes, and particularly well performed. Last Saturday night's audience, my party excluded, seemed smart indeed - if its quick response to Wilde's wicked humor can serve as a measure.

"The Importance of Being Earnest" is about two upper-crust English friends, one of whom, Jack, finds it convenient to have an absent amigo in the city named Ernest. The other, Algernon, likes to go into the country on the excuse of seeing a fictitious invalid named Bunbury. The comedy takes place over three acts, in a bachelor's flat in London, in the garden of a country manor house and in that home's drawing room.

The plot sends characters through romantic entanglements born of deliberate and accidental confusion about identity.

Wilde lampoons the ways of the English aristocracy. While the play moves cleverly along as a romantic comedy, what makes it savagely funny, and a work worthy of Wilde, is its satirical portrait of the ways of the upper class.

This is a land of sizzling utterances, delivered languidly by people who, for the most part, live on family fortunes. Wilde shows a flair for democracy by giving a butler named Lane a few funny lines in Act I. After being told by his employer to shut up already about his family life, Lane agrees, saying, "No sir; it is not a very interesting subject. I never think of it myself."

But it is those who pass their days in leisure who most have the knack for perfectly turned comments and ripostes.

The main pleasure in this production - and it is a big one well suited to summer - is to cherry-pick fabulous lines. Neary's cast has polished them until they gleam.

"The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous," Algernon tells Jack. "It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public."

Max Williams plays Algernon and Patrick Tangredi is Jack. Both were funny and on the mark Saturday, wholly believable in roles that, a century removed from Victorian England, seem impossibly precious.

The two men are paired, after much consternation, with two women who, glory be, get to deliver lines every bit as smart and funny as the fellows.

Marin Ireland, as Jack's love interest Gwendolen, arrived packing tart humor and a fast tongue. "What wonderfully blue eyes you have, Ernest," she tells Jack, believing, as do all of his city friends, that this is his name. "They are quite, quite blue. I hope you will always look at me just like that, especially when there are other people present."

Ireland seemed to set the pace Saturday in her deliveries, shrewdly spurring Gwendolen's lines into a full gallop. The faster they came and went, the more mercurial they seemed.

The risk here is that since so many lines from this play are familiar, if you don't move the language along, watching the play might feel like flipping through a scrapbook of great theater phrases.

As Lady Bracknell, Sara Whitcomb delivered the cold-edged Victorian matriarch. Coming into Algernon's flat and seeing her daughter Gwendolen spooning with Jack, she exclaims: "Mr. Worthing! Rise, sir, from this semi-recumbent posture. It is most indecorous."

Gwendolen and 18-year-old Cecily Cardew, played with a squeaky charm by Stephanie Carlson, get into a terrific argument early in Act II, but find a way to become friends, as a noose tightens around their men.

Neary gets terrific performances from actors in smaller roles, including Jarice Hanson as Miss Prism, Tom McCabe as the Rev. Canon Chasuble, James Emery as Lane and Wes Talbot as another butler named Merriman.

As the last of four shows in the theater's season, "Earnest" is again presented in the larger Theatre 14 space in the Mendenhall Center at Smith College, where New Century is based. Neary's cast delivers what's demanded - a big show performed in superb fashion.