The Importance of Being Earnest
Two lines from “The Importance of Being Earnest” particularly apply to the bright, colorful and very funny production currently at Connecticut Repertory Theatre.
One is at the very start of the play, when the fun-loving city-boy Algernon Moncrieff learns that his friend Ernest Worthing has a secret identity: a country gentleman named Jack.
“You look as if your name is Ernest. You are the most earnest-looking person I ever saw in my life.” Indeed, UConn acting student Nick Nudler looks just as Ernest should look: immaculately dressed, chipper, a touch querulous but otherwise in control.
Likewise, versatile New York actor Stephon Pettway is a fine voice for the frisky, flip Algernon.
Later in the play, when Jack’s fiance Gwendolyn (chic, beatifuly amusing Tabatha Gayle) is peppering Jack with questions about his odd secrets and real intentions, she accepts one excuse this way: “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.”
The classic comedy “The Importance of Being Earnest” gets a modern setting, but respects the text, at UConn’s Connecticut Repertory Theatre. It is gravely important that any production of “The Importance of Being Earnest” be as funny as possible. The jokes about society, status, marriage, parenting, education and pastry-eating need to be savored.
Yet there’s a common problem with productions of “The Importance of Being Earnest” that could not have been foreseen when this laugh-a-minute comedy was first staged, to immediate acclaim, in London in 1895. How do you acknowledge that shortly after the premiere of what has become one of the most admired comedies ever, its author would be convicted for the then-crime of being homosexual, spend the next few years in prison, lose his fortune and fame and social standing, and die a broken man?
The martyrdom of Oscar Wilde is a real comedy-killer. I’ve seen productions of “Earnest” that were played bittersweet, virtually daring audiences to laugh. Others gave the play a resentful tone of heterosexual privilege. Its characters, after all, are infatuated with the idea of marriage. They crave status and claim to abhor scandal, though in their travels and in their diaries they love to deceive.
Jean Randich, a director I followed avidly when she ran the Yale Summer Cabaret and attended the Yale School of Drama in the early ’90s, has found a way to make “The Importance of Being Earnest” as funny as it should be while still touting Oscar Wilde’s importance as a queer icon. The classic three-act structure is maintained. The lines are carefully enunciated for maximum comic impact. The casting is color-blind, which befits an enlightened institution such as UConn, but in terms of age and gender the actors are appropriate to their roles.
Nothing is allowed to distract from the belief that this play is a comedy. It’s not a litmus test, or an ironic statement, or a bringdown. It’s not stuffy. It’s funny. Really funny. On opening night, the actors were still learning how long they had to wait for the laughter to subside before they could safely speak again. Sometimes they were waiting a very long time.
The cast has control of the famous epigraphs, as when Lady Bracknell (Broadway veteran Liz McCartney, dottily domineering) intones austerely that “to lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” Ernest/Jack’s ward Cecily (peppy UConn senior Gillian Rae Pardi) has a way with innocent-ingenue lines like “I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am so afraid he will look like everyone else.”
The actors also get deserved chuckles from how they enunciate certain phrases like “passionate celibacy” and “semi-recumbent posture.”
It’s on the edges of the show where Randich and her design team — sets by Pedro Guevara, lighting by Danielle Verkennes, sound by Teddy Carraro, costumes by Taowen Pan — let some new-school excellence creep in. While the actors sit in period furniture appropriate to the play’s turn-of-the 20th-century setting, the backdrop for the first act is a splashy postmodern painting. The second act is an abstract garden setting with green rugs representing grass, balloons cascading from above, and a greenhouse so small that the actors have to duck down to go inside it.
Some will see these design fillips as expressionist, or as dreamlike abstraction. They certainly brighten the stage and inspire the actors to be more active.
This “Importance of Being Earnest” doesn’t want to be earnest. It wants to be funny. It celebrates and educates, but not at the expense of well-timed comic business.
– Christopher Arnott The Hartford Courant
Love, Sex and Death in the Amazon
“Provocative and inspiring,” says Splash Magazine. “A treasure for the mind, body and spirit.” “Dona Ines (is) magnificently played by Carmen Roman”…and “every actor (does) a superlative job of playing their specific parts.” “Do yourself a favor. Walk away from Broadway for a bit and give yourself the opportunity to experience how ‘real’ theater gets its name,” writes Ellen Eichelbaum. Splash Magazine NY – Read the full review here.
Love, Sex and Death in the Amazon
Can a dead man’s spirit be released? Can the bereaved lover reconcile differences with his abrasive mother-in-law? Who suffers more: the married, bisexual jungle guide, or the gay male widow whose mother-in-law threatens to unhinge him? Is love the fracturing or glue of reality?
As the inaugural production of Collider Theater Company at Paradise Factory, Robert Murphy’s eclectic, deeply affecting new play Love, Sex, and Death in the Amazon, directed by Jean Randich, exposes more questions than it resolves, so that when the play does reach its resolution, the audience is left startlingly raw.
The play opens as Walter (played by Max Wolkowitz), whose Brazilian partner Marcos (Zachary Infante) recently died of leukemia, arrives with his mother-in-law Dona Ines in the Amazon rainforest, where the bereft duo plan to perform a traditional Umbanda ritual to free Marcos’ spirit from the limbo between life ending and death beginning.
A pair of fanatic birdwatchers arrives on the scene, along with a bisexual rainforest tour guide, who tempts Walter away from his monastic grief. The birdwatching dialogue is impeccably researched, and delivered with sharp wit, as is tour guide Fabio’s (Debargo Sanyal) dry commentary on Amazonian flora and fauna. In fact, Murphy’s script—under Randich’s meticulous direction—splices together dramatic scenes and comedic interludes with delightful alacrity and astonishing force.
Scenic and Lighting Designer Jiyoun Chang has created a minimalist set of vivid blue-green platforms and dark space draped with the red woven venomous spider webs that conveys all the rainforest’s lush, humid unpredictability.
Perhaps most gut-wrenching are Walter’s scenes flashing back to the final, agonizing days of Marcos’ life, when the imperfect, abiding love they share is hardly a match for Marcos’ pain and terror. In one scene, Walter carefully changes Marcos’ diaper, an exchange so tender and excruciating the space fills with a stark intimacy, and vulnerability, rarely found in theater.
As Ines—Marcos’ mother— Carmen Roman captures the façade of emotional denial perfectly. Her poise is touchingly regal, and her exchanges with Walter, who accuses her of abandoning her son on his deathbed, build in intensity through the play.
In the climactic rainforest scene, Ines and Walter (and a wily anteater) attempt the Umbanda ceremony, hoping to finally let Marcos’ spirit go. Without giving spoilers, I can say that the scenes in which things go wrong illuminate the human bond these characters increasingly realize they share.
Founded this year by director Jean Randich (www.jeanrandich.com) and playwright Robert Murphy, Collider Theater celebrates international cultural collision, and “aims to explore the bridges that connect us while also investigating our points of difference, disconnect, and incomprehension.”
This production of Love, Sex, and Death in the Amazon runs through October 31, kicking off what promises to be a subversive, evocative, and deeply human new venture in theater.
– Effy Redman
The Constant Couple
Faced with the challenge of staging a 17th-century play, a director is generally thought to have two options: Stay true to the period or update. With her production of George Farquhar’s “Constant Couple,” written in 1699, at the Pearl Theater Company, Jean Randich has the sense to leave a good play largely alone and the wit to establish small links to the present… NY Times – Read the full review here.
An Octoroon
“Jean Randich’s production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins An Octoroon at Pace is really sensational and worth seeing… delicious work.” – Morgan Jenness
The Dispute
“Both Jean Randich’s direction and Neil Bartlett’s outstanding translation treat the story with humor and affection, capturing the jolie-laide purity of Marivaux’s characters. The lovely all-white set is adapted from a production design by Mike Rancourt and Ms. Randich.” NY Times – Read the full review here.
Antigone
“The director, Jean Randich, gives this group — seven men and a woman — the kind of ceremonial presence an ancient Greek chorus is presumed to have had. These Theban citizens are choreographed in movement and dance on the deep stage of the Intar 53 Theater. They underline their speech with the thumping of drums and percussive sticks; and occasionally they sing their distress in clearly articulated, and intricately harmonized, voices to haunting melodies composed by Robert Murphy for this production.” NY Times – Read the full review here.
The Floating Box
What the audience has heard, in lovely interchanges with the voices, is an erhu — a two-string Chinese fiddle, encountered in New York mostly on subway platforms — gorgeously played by Wang Guowei. NY Times – Read the full review here.
Killing the Boss
…the work’s affecting quality, which sneaks up on you in this subtle production (directed by Jean Randich), is nothing to dismiss… NY Times – Read the full review here.
J.P. Morgan Saves the Nation
“Undoubtedly, the New York Stock Exchange has seen money move at many speeds and in many ways. But has it ever had the chance to witness a chorus line of paper dollars pulsing carnally to a disco beat?
….The show, directed by Jean Randich with choreography by Doug Elkins, charts the life and times of Morgan with a multitude of specific historical references and a hand of iron…..Some of these events have been divertingly staged. The battle for control of the Susquehanna Railroad is done as a period melodrama, which concludes with Morgan, in a Dudley Do-Right voice, announcing, “I alone must reorder the entire economy of the United States in the 19th century.”
This is surely your only chance to watch stockbrokers strangling each other on Wall Street to the rhythms of a rock minuet. Those who have been burned playing the market recently may find it a gratifying sight.” NY Times – Read the full review here.
He Who Says Yes / He Who Says No
The staging and performances are impeccable. These new to me actors (except for Thomas Kouo who I recently saw in a much more Broadway-like show, Making Tracks,) are fine singers and actors. I was particularly impressed with the poise of young Lexine Bondoc, one of two actors alternating in the part of the Boy. CurtainUp – Read the full review here.
Lemkin’s House
Words are no match for action, and neither are mere laws. Raphael Lemkin, a real-life lawyer who died in 1959, learns this in his imagined afterlife in “Lemkin’s House,” a compelling, well-acted play by Catherine Filloux at the 78th Street Theater Lab. NY Times – Read the full review here.
Leah’s Train
The script is filled with coincidences and surreal moments, and it’s to the credit of director Jean Randich and her cast that the action never seems too unbelievable. The production wisely focuses on the human touches rather than the fantastic, ultimately telling a simple and moving tale about a family and the ways it deals with grief and sacrifice. TheatreMania – Read the full review here.
Killing the Boss
“The work’s affecting quality…sneaks up on you in this subtle production (directed by Jean Randich)…” NY Times – Read the full review here.
Dog and Wolf
“Jasmina, a political refugee, is definitely coming on to her lawyer. Then she demonstrates her tender feelings by buying him a gift: a book about genocide grave sites. Nothing about the characters’ behavior makes much sense in Catherine Filloux’s unpretentious one-act “Dog and Wolf.” The work, playfully directed by Jean Randich at 59E59 Theaters, is often entertaining but definitely off balance.” NY Times – Read the full review here.