February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The late Katharine Hepburn once starred in a production of ?Much Ado About Nothing? set in the American Southwest, and Ingmar Bergman directed a ?Hamlet? that closed with the arrival of Fortinbras in a space ship.
The American Shakespeare Festival relocated ?Troilus and Cressida? to the U.S. Civil War, and the Abbey Theatre set it in Belfast at the height of the city?s urban violence.
Oscar Wilde?s ?The Importance of Being Earnest,? often referred to as the funniest comedy in the English language, is currently the subject of a New York revival at the hands of the internationally praised Agile Theatre Company, the premiere production on the comfortable subterranean stage of the Baruch Performance Arts Center at 150 East 25th St. in Manhattan.
Aquila, based in London and New York, and admired in the past for its innovative stagings of Shakespeare?s ?A Comedy of Errors? and ?Much Ado About Nothing,? has now aimed its creative guns at the glittering Wildean perennial with results that are either dazzlingly enjoyable or tedious in the extreme, depending on your willingness to go the distance with a truly far out conceptual scheme.
Agile rationalizes its approach with a brief program note composed of two simple declarative sentences. ? ?The Importance of Being Earnest,? ? it reads, ?was first produced at the St. James Theatre in London on February 14, 1895. It was a modern dress production.?
That declaration, printed in boldface type, carries with it a certain element of defiance, as if daring the audience not to go along for the ride provided by Aquila?s artistic director, Peter Meineck, and stage director, Robert Richmond.
The team?s approach is not easy to describe. The production, like the attractive Aquila actors, shows unyielding respect for the play?s text, playing the scenes with energy, intelligence and wit.
At the same time, Richmond and his performers have layered the text with daring injections of well-selected rock music, moments of comedic slapstick and, here and there, gracefully interpolated fragments of dance and gymnastics.
A few decades ago, director Peter Brook had a substantial hit with a production of ?A Midsummer Night?s Dream? set in a shining white gymnasium, complete with ladder ropes, swings and a trapeze.
The Aquila ?Importance,? in its modest way, calls that celebrated Royal Shakespeare Company venture to mind, first of all because of its pristine scenic design, which resembles a fresh green cricket pitch lined in gleaming white, highlighted by transparent plastic furniture.
With minor adjustments achieved by the actors, the set, initially representing Algernon Moncrieff?s flat in West London?s Half-Moon Street, converts to become the garden of the Manor House in Woolton, Hertfordshire.
By now, the casting of a male actor as the imperious dowager, Lady Augusta Bracknell, has become something of a clich