Viewing The Importance of Being Ernest Hemingway, a
production of M-34 Theatre now on tap through September 1 at the Access (380
Broadway), is a bit like attending an exhibit of abstract expressionism at the
Museum of Modern Art.
There is much to contemplate, to take pleasure in, to admire,
to be moved by, and, yes, to puzzle over in what is less a straightforward play
than a theatrical expression of both ideas and emotions, inspired by the
unlikely pairing of the works of Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemingway.
In a recent interview, James Rutherford, M-34’s artistic
director and co-adaptor (with dramaturg Elliot B. Quick), said that The
Importance of Being Ernest Hemingway first saw the light of day five years ago
as the culmination of a “series of drunken and impassioned meetings” regarding
the juxtapositioning of the Wilde and Hemingway materials. The company's website also refers to the play as a
“trivial comedy,” a description that Wilde appended to the play that serves as
framework for this one—The Importance of Being Earnest.
While it is easy to imagine the former (the title alone
suggests a possible off-the-cuff joke as a takeoff point), there is little that
is trivial in the result, which examines issues of the superficial masks we use
in our daily human intercourse and the depths of feeling and vulnerability these
cover up.
As an abstraction, The Importance of Being Ernest Hemingway
is most like a collage. Wilde and Hemingway have provided the words, with
sources that include—in addition to Wilde’s famous comedy—his play Salome, his
epistle De Profundus written from prison to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, and
his poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Hemingway’s contributions include excerpts from his novels The Sun Also
Rises and A Farewell to Arms, and from his non-fiction work on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon.
But like any good collage, if you look at it closely you
will see (or project) many more influences.
These are the ones I jotted on my program while watching the play: the Marx Brothers, the experimental
playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie, Sam Shepard, Lewis Carroll, Tennessee
Williams (his late works), the staging of the recent production of Murder
Ballad, and the over-the-top directing style that Jesse Berger employed in the
first couple of seasons of productions by the Red Bull Theater, with
homoeroticism and interposed musical numbers as subtexts.
That should give you something to think about.
While there is no straight-through plot, let me try to
impose one. Imagine that American expats
living in Paris in 1926 are putting on a production of The Importance of Being
Earnest. The Americans are painted
something along the lines of the character of Harry Selfridge, as played by
Jeremy Piven in the PBS period drama Mr. Selfridge: loud, crude, pushy, sexually bold, and
somewhat crazed—rather different from the genteel if eccentric folks in Mr.
Wilde’s play. Wilde’s famous witticisms
remain but take on decidedly new shades of meaning with the insertion of
Hemingway’s language.
This is an intensely physical production that includes (thanks
to fight choreographer Alexander Salamat) credible episodes of boxing,
wrestling, general horseplay, slapping, and the occasional piece of overturned
furniture, as the two central characters, Algernon and Jack, work through
notions of masculinity, the expectations of social norms, and the immediate
impact and subsequent implications of an outburst of alcohol-fuelled honesty
and raw emotion.
To add even more to the stew, there are other wildly
choreographed moments, original music by Alex Clifford, and a rendition of “It
Had To Be You,” in four-part harmony no less.
For such an abstract work, the acting, which requires
intense attention to detail and to shifts in tone, is outstanding. I will single out for special praise Ross
Cowan as Algernon and Tim Hassler as Jack, who carry a great deal of the heavy
lifting on their shoulders, but truly everyone is up to the task. The women, who generally are required to
stick more closely to the Wilde script, are also excellent, with Charlotte
Graham as Cecily most attuned to her character’s romantic flakiness and charm.
The Importance of Being Ernest Hemingway is clearly a labor
of love for all concerned. M-34 and its
artistic director, Mr. Rutherford, have come back to it more than once over the
years. And while, in my view, it could
do with a bit of trimming and further shaping, it is an intriguing production
that is most worthy of their tough and tender ministrations.
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