Theater Review: The Importance Of Seeing Wilde’s Masterpiece At Eventide

 Let’s see now — between the glum weather and the glummer news, might you need a little escapist fun? Some genuinely witty entertainment, expressed by people who speak in complete, grammatically correct, vocabulary-rich sentences? All of whom are wearing sumptuous costumes and playing out their story on richly-decorated sets?

And of course (no spoiler possible with a classic farce), where romance meets a challenge, love conquers all, and everything ends happily ever after?

Then consider a trip to the Gertrude Lawrence Stage on Route 6A in Dennis to see Oscar Wilde’s masterful “The Importance of Being Earnest,” presented by the Eventide Theatre Company (ETC).

This production excels. The cast — Maeve Moriarty, Keith Richard Chamberlain, Rick Sherburne, Daniel Powers, Joe Hackler, Dafydd Rees, Brynn Grambow, Hannah Reggio and Kathleen Larson Day — are perfect in their roles. But Rees steals the show. To tell you how would really be to spoil some great fun.

Director/Producer Lynne Johnson puts the play through such a brisk pace that two-and-a-half hours (with two intermissions) pass at quantum speed. It’s beautiful to look at, too. Set designer Tristan Divincenzo and costume designer Tami Trask-Goode tastefully and richly decorated the production to whisk the audience away to upper-class Londoners in 1895, to a flat in the city and then to a garden and a drawing-room at a country manor house.

Another fun detail of this “Earnest” is the keyboard at the back of the auditorium. Ably played by Pam Wannie, it injects sly comments on the stage action, usually with tunes of our own day.

Because the characters are Londoners, the cast plays them with full-out British accents. As one who finds such pronunciation of our common language hard to understand, I sometimes had to struggle to follow the story, especially in the first act. But there’s lots of physical comedy too, some of it wonderfully broad, that transcends words.

A nice detail of Wilde’s play is its large number of two-character exchanges, which are hilarious. Reverend Canon Chasuble, DD (Sherburne) and Miss Prism (Day) carry on their very own kind of flirtation. Gwendolen Fairfax (Grambow) and Cecily Cardew (Reggio) have a deliciously snarky tea.

But as for Lady Bracknell (Rees), well, nothing is quite a true dialogue with her. In her own mind, she stands head-and-shoulders above everyone else, even in her small high-class orbit. Rees simply owns the stage when everyone, both cast and audience, holds their breath any time the Lady so much as chooses to stand up or sit down.

It should be noted that there is plenty of audience. The early part of this ETC run sold out, so if you want to join the fun, order your tickets now. You’ll be glad you did.

The next shows scheduled by Eventide Theatre Company are “A Grand Night for Singing” (April 3-13); the annual ETC Cabaret (May 31); and “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” (Nov. 6-14).