Word: algernon
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...days in Zurich during the war, when he may or may not have been the British consul and may or may not have met both Joyce and Lenin. There is one thing he is sure of, though; he was a huge success as Ernest--no the other one, Algernon--in Joyce's production of Wilde's The Importance of Being Ernest. At least he thinks so, but it was a long time ago, and things changed, and Joyce went on and Lenin went on and everybody went on, but Henry Carr...
...good thing so many of Wild's lines are virtually actor-proof, bacause in the Leverett House production they need all protection they can get. The problem begins with director Samuel Bloomfield's conception of the play. The two sets of main characters--Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, the spoiled, young dandies, and Gwendolen Fairfax and Cecily Cardew, the vain, young ingenues who wish for beaux named "Earnest"--should appear essntially interchangeable. Otherwise, the contusion of identities in the second act and the symmetry of the romantic pairings at the end make little dramatic sense...
Bloomfield's failure lies in his decision to differentiate too sharply between the two ladies and the two gentlemen. Jon Goerner's Algernon--the best performance among the four leads--is a blatantly effeminate fop whose satirical jabs make him seem downright nasty. Davis Goodman's Jack, on the other hand, appears rather put upon, no better than a straight man to Algernon's wit. Goodman makes the balance still more unequal by his inability to vary sufficiently his intonations and break our of the sing-song which mars his delivery...
...Algernon's clipped witticisms and Miss Prism's agonized confrontation with her own carelessness are the two high points of this production. But its real star is Joe Mobilia's sets, whose every detail--from the porcelain tea service to the yellow silk upholstered sofa--elegantly evokes late victorian decadence...
...There is no evidence that they ever met each other, but in Travesties, they do. Stoppard was further intrigued by a suit filed against Joyce by one Henry Carr for the price of a pair of trousers. A minor British consular official, Carr had purchased the trousers to play Algernon Moncrieff in The Importance of Being Earnest for a Joyce-managed troupe called the English Players...