'The Importance of Being Earnest' comes to Wheaton College
A theatrical chestnut, "The Importance of Being Earnest," brings a 1920s-era set to a 500-seat theater space on the Wheaton College campus starting tonight.
The student production of Oscar Wilde's witty take on superficiality and high society runs through Feb. 7 in the Jukebox Theater, a playhouse nestled inside the Billy Graham Center. The theater company is celebrating its fourth season.
"It's an entirely student-run endeavor," said student producer Maggie Thomas of Jukebox. "It's entirely directed, acted and produced by students."
Thomas said the theater group presents two or three shows each season.
"We try to keep it evenly split between plays, musicals and musical revues," she said.
Assistant student director Arwen McCune, a junior English literature major, said she long has admired Wilde's script for "Earnest."
"It's very wry and sarcastic," she said, adding that it often exposes the wide gap between honesty and artificiality. "Oscar Wilde takes the opportunity to mock high society's idea of what's proper."
The story revolves around the characters' carefully constructed web of lies and their duplicitous relationships.
"I chose this play because it is the kind of play I would like to act in myself," senior Nolan Lynch, the show's director, wrote in an e-mail message. "'The Importance of Being Earnest' is an established, accessible, classic piece of theater."
McCune and Lynch have worked together before, in last year's staging of Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing." Lynch directed and McCune played the part of Ursula.
"I always like the Shakespeare plays best because of the language," Lynch said.
Lynch said "Earnest," which made its stage debut in 1895, originally was set in the 1890s. Jukebox is moving the timeline to the 1920s because it's slightly easier to find vintage set pieces and props for that period, he said.
Lynch said the script references cultural and historical events of the era.
"Even a great many of the jokes in the play have to do with things distinct to Britain of the late 1800s. However, the essential humor of Oscar Wilde is in his wordplay, and, in this particular play, in the frivolity of his characters," Lynch wrote. "These two things, words and human frivolity, are both timeless and timelessly funny. There are lots of puns, lots of verbal cleverness, and lots of silly people."
"It's situationally funny. There's people pretending and other people figuring out," McCune said.
McCune said the two-act play, while inoffensive and G-rated enough for children, is aimed at an adult audience.
"It's very, very verbal," she said.
<p class="factboxheadblack">"The Importance of Being Earnest"</p> <p class="News"><b>Who:</b> Presented by Wheaton College students' Jukebox Theater </p> <p class="News"><b>Where:</b> Barrows Auditorium, Billy Graham Center, 500 College Ave., Wheaton</p> <p class="News"><b>When:</b> 8 p.m. Jan. 29, 30, 31 and Feb. 6 and 7</p> <p class="News"><b>Tickets:</b> $3; available at the door</p> <p class="News"><b>Info:</b> (630) 752-6911 or <a href="http://www.wheaton.edu" target="new">www.wheaton.edu</a></p>