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Written by Michael Muckian
Jun 30, 2011
When actor Greg Vinkler dons drag and plays Lady Bracknell in Peninsula Players’ production of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” he will be participating in one more grand theater tradition. This tradition, however, is not very old.
Since Wilde’s “trivial comedy for serious people” premiered in 1895, it has featured a long line of actresses portraying the Lady Bracknell role, including Dame Edith Evans and Stockard Channing. But beginning about 1975, male actors also have played the character, says Vinkler, who also serves as artistic director for the summer stock company based in the Door County community of Fish Creek. Brian Bedford played Bracknell in Roundabout Theatre Co.’s revival of the play on Broadway earlier this year, earning a Tony Award nomination in the process.
Each male actor brings something different to the role, Vinkler says.
“Some actors like to tip their hand, saying a few lines in a deeper voice as if they’re sharing a joke with the audience,” he explains. “I plan to the play the role straight and would love it if the audience would forget that I’m a man during the performance.”
The high farce focuses on two protagonists who take on false identities to escape their social obligations. They both assume the name “Ernest,” which leads to a great deal of mistaken identity, creating the elements of humor that drive the narrative.
Wilde was criticized at the time for writing a play with no redeeming social message. However, the apparent lack of message may in itself be Wilde’s commentary on the Victorian mores of the era, according to Kristine Thatcher, who is directing Peninsula Players’ production.
“There is no doubt Wilde was skewering the vacuousness and hypocrisy of London’s aristocracy at the time,” said Thatcher, who worked with the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre in the 1970s and ’80s and now heads Stormfield Theater in Lansing, Mich. “But he did it in such a way as to make them laugh at themselves. Hopefully, some of them might have walked away from the play taking a little inventory of their own lives.”
Part of the play’s humor also comes through Wilde’s inventive wordplay, Thatcher says. The dialogue crackles with clever inversions, delightful ironies and the lowest of puns. Knowing the Victorian parlance, social structure and customs can heighten the humor, but is not necessary to enjoy the play, she says.
“Just as with Shakespeare, in the hands of fine actors these differences in language still translate quite handily to our own culture today, and the actors can make the meaning quite clear,” she says.
When “Earnest” premiered on Feb. 14, 1895 – St. Valentine’s Day – at London’s St. James’s Theatre, Wilde was at the height of his career. But he was also at the end of his career. An ongoing feud with the Marquess of Queensbury, the father of Wilde’s alleged lover Lord Alfred Douglas, came to a climax in court. Wilde was sentenced to two years hard labor for “gross indecency.”
That experience, which yielded the treatise “De Profundis” and the poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” broke the author physically and spiritually. In 1900, five years after the premier of his greatest work, Wilde died destitute in Paris.
Some critics speculate that the word “earnest” became a code word meaning “gay” for Wilde. The several characters named Ernest, as well as those queried about being “earnest,” are thought to reflect elements of London’s gay culture at the time. But nothing conclusive has ever come of the speculation, Vinkler says.
“Oscar Wilde was an artist and craftsman and, artistically speaking, the play is a triumph of writing,” Vinkler says. “I have no interest in making a statement or camping it up. It’s a good play, and I want to do justice to it.”
