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A Wilde time: Comedy of manners 'The Importance of Being Earnest' comes to Adobe Theater
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Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People” is “one of the three most perfect plays ever written,” according to Mario Cabrera, who is directing the Victorian classic for Adobe Theater this month. It runs from Friday, Dec. 5, through Sunday, Dec. 21.
Cabrera’s other two “perfect plays” are Noël Coward’s “Private Lives” and William Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors.” All three comedies, he said, share a concision and directness that makes them easy to follow.
“Audiences appreciate that,” Cabrera said. “They will tune you out if they have to do too much work, or if they’re too confused. So, I always try to make sure that anything they are seeing — whether I’m performing it or whether I have other actors performing it — is as clear as a bell.”
In this case, Cabrera is both directing and performing in the role of Lady Bracknell, a condescending aristocrat with a sharp tongue who has been played by many male actors over the years, including Brian Bedford, David Suchet and Stephen Fry.
“I understand from some of Oscar Wilde’s own writing that the original actress who played Lady Bracknell was rather tall for being a woman and rather mannish and could never understand why she was funny,” Cabrera said. “The role is funny because she is presented in the way that a Victorian male would have been presented in that era, not a woman. So, as with many other things in the play, it’s reversed. In Victorian England, it would have been a real knee-slapper to have any woman saying those lines. For a modern audience, it helps if there’s a more masculine facade behind it all.”
Cabrera is not camping up the role, though.
“I’m not gonna wear balloon breasts or anything,” he said. “I’m playing it perfectly straight, because I couldn’t imagine it being done any other way.”
“The Importance of Being Earnest” is a farcical comedy of manners about two young men-about-town who both assume the name “Ernest” while wooing the young women they desire. The “Ernest/earnest” pun and the contrast between earnestness and deception becomes a running theme throughout this send-up of Victorian social hypocrisy.
Cabrera said it was initially difficult to find young actors with the chops to do a classic Victorian comedy like this.
“What’s that old adage — dying is easy; comedy is hard? — because it is. I could take somebody off the street, and in a week I could teach them to do the ‘To be or not to be’ speech (from William Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’) in such a way that it would look like they’re (Laurence) Olivier,” Cabrera said. “But I could never teach the same person the comedy techniques to do a play like this … It requires too much precision … And many young actors are not taught that anymore, because for film, which is what most of them are after these days, you don’t really need it.”
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In the end, Cabrera said he found the right actors for the roles, including Michael Weppler, who plays Jack Worthing, the main “Ernest” character.
“He is well-known in town. He performs a lot, and I have worked with Michael many times before, both as an actor onstage and as a director,” Cabrera said. “He’s a wonderful young man, wonderfully easy to work with, and he gets this. I kind of had him in mind when this production came up, because it requires a certain kind of person to do that part … He can do the drama and the comedy, and he’s experienced enough that he can handle the language and all of that.”
Cabrera said Clair Gardner, who plays Gwendolen Fairfax, is doing a wonderful job, as is Nicee Brown, who plays Cecily Cardew, despite being “nowhere near 18, which is what we’re passing her off as.”
“Fortunately, I got very lucky,” he said. “I have an excellent cast, all of whom are right on the nose about all of this.”
