This story is featured in CityBeat’s July 26 print edition.
The Irish playwright Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was a consummate provocateur, and his most delightful satire of British snobbery, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), remains a frequently produced comedy after more than a century. So popular and spot-on, the show inspired a sequel earlier this year, The Rewards of Being Frank. That update by Alice Scovell had its world premiere at Cincinnati Shakespeare Company in January 2023 followed by a second engagement in a collaboration with the New York Classical Theatre.
According to Brian Isaac Phillips, Cincy Shakes’ producing artistic director, in a recent CityBeat interview, “The Rewards of Being Frank performed very well. We saw an opportunity to stage Earnest this summer: It’s a company favorite and an audience favorite. People had requested it a lot.”
The production of Frank featured two Cincy Shakes veterans Kelly Mengelkoch as Gwendolen Fairfax and Jeremy Dubin as Jack Worthing, who goes by the name Ernest. Several New York actors rounded out the ensemble: James Evans as Algernon Moncrief, Jack’s cousin; Tora Nogami Alexander as Cecily Cardew; and Christine Pedi as Lady Augusta Bracknell, Cecily’s starchy, snobbish aunt.
“We had a really great cast with great chemistry, so we thought, ‘What if we bring it back together this summer for a production of Earnest?’” The cast will reunite, including Pedi, who returns to Cincinnati as the arrogant Lady Bracknell. A veteran New York musical performer, she is familiar to fans of SiriusXM’s “On Broadway” channel where she’s a daily host of musical theater programming.
Pedi is pleased to take on this iconic role again. Several years ago she began to have vision problems that made musical theater performance difficult. “I am limited to how quickly I can navigate around the stage,” she told CityBeat in a recent phone interview. “I started thinking maybe I could do serious drama and comedies, what’s called ‘Park & Bark.’”
At a dinner party in New York City she told friends not to fret, that she had decided to change her script. She said, “I could do drawing room comedies — Noël Coward, Oscar Wilde, Lady Bracknell. Within a few months of saying that, I got this unexpected audition with Cincinnati Shakespeare, which puzzled me because I’ve never done Shakespeare. I didn’t know what they wanted with me. But it was for The Rewards of Being Frank. I saw that Lady Bracknell was a character breakdown. It turned out to be a brand-new sequel, written in the classical style of Oscar Wilde. I was truly stunned because I had never given Bracknell a minute’s thought prior to my attempt at leaving positive energy in the air with my friends instead of negative energy.”
She excelled in the role. “When she walks into a room, you know that she’s walked into the room,” Phillips said. “When she walks onto a stage, you know that that stage is hers. That’s what Bracknell needs, that presence. When an actor just has that, it’s something you want to take advantage of. And Christine absolutely does.”
Cincy Shakes has three previous productions of Earnest in its nearly three-decade history. Each one followed a recent tradition of a male actor playing Lady Bracknell in drag. Pedi will be the first woman to take on the role for Cincinnati’s classical stage company. Phillips acknowledges the tradition: “A lot of humor does come from having a man in drag saying some of those lines. But that’s a construct we’ve put on it, not what Wilde intended.” When a man is in the role, he adds, “You have a distraction in front of you, another gag in front of you, almost a hat on a hat. With a woman in the role, this allows us to get back to the original joke.
“Now it’s time to do it the original way, hewing close to Wilde’s intention. For him it is a mockery of the classes, of the sort of snobbery that happened in ‘polite London society.’ This gives us the opportunity for focus on Wilde’s text and what he’s saying through laughter, through Bracknell.”
Pedi is relishing the role. “In her own way, Lady Bracknell, veiled with propriety, takes no prisoners. She sets her agenda, and others will conform. When a character is seemingly so rigid, there lies comedy. She always seems to be played as a woman with a keen fashion sense, ever so slightly over the top, but within the confines of respectability.” Pedi likes to consider, “Maybe that means she had a past.”
Cincy Shakes’ August production, which Phillips will direct, will expand upon the scenic and costume designs employed for The Rewards of Being Frank. New York Classical Theatre is a smaller company with fewer resources. This summer the Cincinnati production team — scenic designer Samantha Reno and costumer Rainy Edwards — will have more latitude to craft more lavish scenery and attire, especially for the imperious Lady Bracknell. Phillips suggests, “This production will look a little more like the set and costumes for Frank on steroids.
“This is a great play for actors, and one of my jobs as a director is to get out of their way to be sure they don’t run into the furniture — and that they have enough cucumber sandwiches,” a running gag throughout The Importance of Being Earnest. It’s a sure bet that Cincy Shakes’ audiences will be laughing during August.
The Importance of Being Earnest, produced by Cincinnati Shakespeare Company at the Otto M. Budig Theater in Over-the-Rhine, opens on Aug. 4 and continues through Aug. 20. Info: cincyshakes.com.
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This article appears in Jul 12-25, 2023.
