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Summer seems perfect for a crazy, comedic farce like Long Beach Shakespeare Company’s upcoming production of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest.”
And like icing on an ice-cream cake, the theater is updating the play’s 1895 Victorian style to a flamboyant early-1980s New Romantic look, influenced by the likes of musicians Adam Ant and Grace Jones.
Wilde’s play is a witty, tangled comedy-of-manners directed by Rebekah Walendzak Slepski, who also teaches sketch comedy at the renowned improv theater The Second City.
The play centers on Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, two young men whose invented identities create a whirlwind of romantic complications, social absurdities and family revelations, the theater says.
Though the characters and social rules of the play remain Victorian, the visuals will be “bolder, brighter and more theatrical,” according to the theater, where London becomes a world of style, observation and carefully curated appearances.
Meanwhile, the countryside town of Woolton offers a dreamier landscape of romance, imagination and possibility.
“Wilde’s comedy is not a museum piece,” says Slepski. “It is alive with questions about identity, performance, self-invention, love and the courage required to be seen.”
Against the rigid social norms of the time, the play’s characters invent names, personas, histories and excuses in order to move more freely.
“Everyone is wearing a mask,” the theater says, and the play begs questions about how we present ourselves. Who gets to define us? What stories do we tell in order to belong? What happens when the persona we invent is closer to the truth than the identity we were given?
This visually updated production echoes Musical Theatre West’s musically modernized “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” upcoming at the Carpenter Center, as well as Long Beach Shakespeare Company’s own embrace of innovation in its recent “Antony and Cleopatra” and New Works Festival.
Its current “The Importance of Being Earnest” should be a fun mashup of old and new. As the theater describes, “Victorian England provides the structure. The New Romantics provide the attitude. Together, they create a world where style is not superficial, where beauty carries meaning and where performance may reveal the truth.”
Long Beach Shakespeare Company’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” runs from July 10 to 25 at the Helen Borgers Theatre, 4250 Atlantic Ave., with shows Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m., plus an understudy performance Thursday, July 16 at 8 p.m. For tickets and information, call the box office at 562-997-1494 or visit LBShakespeare.org.