The Importance of Being Earnest
Hale Center Theater OremView digital playbillJan 6, 2021 – Feb 13, 2021
The Importance of Being Earnest helped make it Oscar Wilde’s most enduringly popular play. In a way it’s a “love letter,” first performed on Valentine’s Day of 1895 at the St. James’s Theatre in London. Wilde subtitled it “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People,” a phrase that points to the essence of the play. It is “serious” about being “trivial.” It is fun for the sake of having fun. Wilde wrote Earnest quickly in the month of August, 1894, while spending the summer with his family at the seaside resort town of Worthing, England. He spent two more months refining characters, farcical incidents, broad puns, nonsense dialogue, and non-sequiturs into what has come to be known as his “crowning achievement.” The opening night audience in 1895, according to one report, “included many members of the great and good, former cabinet ministers and privy councilors, as well as actors, writers, academics, and enthusiasts”. Allan Aynesworth, who played Algernon Moncrieff, recalled that “In my fifty-three years of acting, I never remember a greater triumph than [that] first night.” Even though The Importance of Being Earnest is a farcical comedy that satirizes the social conventions of late Victorian London, it extends to us today an opportunity to enter a place of “make-believe” that invites us to step away from the COVID-induced desert of this world for a few short hours, and partake of a performance more real than food and drink, one that can transport our hearts and souls to a place of carefree enjoyment, strengthening us to go back to the desert and face the world again, refreshed and renewed. This show is dedicated to anyone who has ever fallen in love and either proposed or received a proposal of marriage. It is also dedicated to anyone who loves a good old farcical romp through an English or American countryside. And finally, it is dedicated to all who have seen and loved the story of Earnest or who are just now experiencing it for the first time. Welcome to the wonderful wacky world of The Importance of Being Earnest!