As a young company NCHT keeps a modest itinerary. Our official season, last year, included our musical “Flight” and the classic comedy “Arsenic and Old Lace.”
This year our classic show is “The Importance of Being Earnest,” and it is opening March 15 at the Grover C. Fields Middle School stage—a really great stage, by the way. Don’t let that “Middle School” thing fool you.
It runs Friday and Saturday at 7 p.m., Sunday the 17th at 2 p.m., and repeats March 22-24. If you miss it, you’ll miss one of the greatest comedies in the English language!
I’ve always been a huge fan of this show.
I’ve directed it twice, myself – the first time for an outdoor stage in little Greenville, Pennsylvania, where I also portrayed the lead, John Worthing. Because the John and his friend Algernon have quite a debate about muffins in the show, we had young ladies hawking muffins at intermission.
The play was first performed on Valentine’s Day at London’s Saint James Theater in 1895.
It’s a brilliant satire about upper class hypocrisy with its characters making frivolous mountains of mole hills throughout.
The play is full of double identities and incidents – past and present – gone comically awry. It’s a bit tricky to try to describe this show in this little blog, but here’s a link that will fill you in nicely:
“Earnest” has so many great parts and that of Lady Bracknell is considered one of the greatest in theater—a genuinely meaty roll for mature women. But really, there’s not a dull character in it, and the actors always have a great time. I’m sure you will, too.
Though I can’t promise you any muffins.
The author/playwright is Oscar Wilde, who turned out several plays and that classic novel, “The Picture of Dorian Grey” (it’s a book that never grows old). He was known as quite the societal wit. In our next blog, we’ll take a closer look at him and the controversy that surrounded his life.
In the meantime, let me leave you with a few of the quotes from this show:
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.”
“To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness.”
“In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.”
“I’ll bet you anything you like that half an hour after they have met, they will be calling each other sister.” And the response, “Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first.”
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