ARTS
June Theater Preview BY DONNA HOKE
An Ideal Husband Irish Classical Theatre Company By Oscar Wilde Director: David Oliver Cast: Steve Jakiel, Ben Michael Moran, Chris Kelly, David Lundy, Gerry Maher, Kristen Tripp Kelley, Pamela Rose Mangus, Kristin Bentley, Jessica Wegrzyn, Andrea Gollhardt, Kate LoConti
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his month, Irish Classical Theatre Company presents Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, considered to be a dramatic masterpiece on par with The Importance of Being Earnest, and
AN INSIDE VIEW
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Wilde’s second most produced play. It features political corruption and scandal and, of course, a letter of great import—all imbued with the Wilde bon mots that keep us coming back. Interestingly, shortly after the play’s 1895 opening, Wilde was involved in a scandal of his own, having been arrested for “gross indecency,” an event that led to his name being publicly removed from the play. “An Ideal Husband is a particularly interesting Wilde play as he reflected himself in a few ways. The idea of the public disgrace of Sir Robert Chiltern [in the play] may well have prefigured Wilde’s own scandal that ruined him,
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www.foreveryoungwny.com | June 2016
which took place not long after he’d written the play,” muses director David Oliver. “Wilde had, previous to his ultimate downfall, flippantly disregarded two attempts to blackmail him regarding his affair with Lord Alfred Douglas—a bold move that may have regardless given him the sense that despite not backing down, he may be in a precarious situation. He was certainly aware of what social scandal could wreak.” In An Ideal Husband, Wilde has created bachelor Lord Goring, who advises Chiltern to stand up to his blackmailer and come clean. “Lord Goring was a true reflection of himself in that his aesthetic philosophy of the intrinsic beauty of art as its own reward, above the deeper meanings or Victorian mores gave the ‘dandy’ free range over language and surface pleasures,” offers Oliver. “However, his great paradox being that this was a dandy with heart, the wisest and cleverest man in the room.” Oliver posits that Earnest is the more produced of the two plays because it is “less challenging in its way in that it doesn’t tackle the finer details of marital roles and avoids the more emotional content. [For example], Husband presents a certain challenge on how to deal with gender. The very fact that gender as an issue was being dealt with on the threshold of the new millennium is significant. However, for Neil Wechsler, our dramaturg, and me, making the right cuts to the script became important. There is the risk of alienating your audience with some of the existing broad statements about the roles of women and men in the play, or giving [the audience] opportunities to laugh at the archaic over the insightful.” Nonetheless, Oliver promises there will still be plenty of laughter
provided by the “interesting mix of Wilde’s banter that we all love so much, especially from the young couple in the piece representing a more modern approach to marriage, along with a touch of emotional melodrama expressed through the central ‘idealistic’ relationship of the Chilterns.” An Ideal Husband runs June 3-26 at Irish Classical Theatre Company (irishclassicaltheatre.com, 853-4282). Akeelah and the Bee Subversive Theatre Collective By Cheryl West Director: Kelly Beuth Starring: students of Buffalo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts
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keelah and the Bee is a marvelous story of coming of age under difficult circumstances and learning not to let those circumstances that we are born into define the rest of our lives,” previews Kelly Beuth, who directs this, the sixth installment of the Subversive Youth Series. “Akeelah learns to work hard and put time, energy, and hard work into her education, so that she will not follow down the path of the streets like so many around her. It is also a piece about the breaking down of walls between class and socioeconomic backgrounds. Akeelah encounters so many who are different from her and learns not to fear difference, but embrace it.” The play has only recently been published, and Beuth was excited to introduce it to her middle school students before realizing how much her older students would gain from