Allan Appel Photo
Mychael Green as Algernon and Robert Pease as Jack face off in Act One.
A serious outbreak is spreading rapidly throughout Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School: Students concocting imaginary people and places in order to avoid their obligations.
Fortunately, it’s all happening on stage in the energetic all-school production of Oscar Wilde’s hilarious The Importance of Being Earnest.
The play — which has afflicted the cast with bunburying, or creating fictitious folks to avoid reality — runs at Co-Op Thursday at 6:30 p.m. and Friday at 2:30 and 6:30 p.m. Tickets can be purchased at the door.
Cucumber sandwiches fly as they wait for Lady Bracknell.
Mistaken identities, deliberate and not, are at the heart of the 1895 farce. It has been a passion for Co-Op drama teacher Rob Esposito to produce.
“I love farce,” said Esposito . So he said he’s absolutely inflicting his passion on his students.
Another reason he chose the play, whose nine roles are two-thirds male: “I have a lot of very talented boys” in the graduating class.
Wilde’s fast-paced buddy play features wittily quotable dialogue at every third speech. It explores, on the surface of the plot, the advantages and disadvantages of marriage in a send-up of late Victorian values.
Some critics, especially at the time of its debut, viewed the play as pure inane fun with verbal pyrotechnics on display. On a deeper level, the comedy is also about the serious business of what makes up a personality or human identity.
In the two-month preparation for the show, Esposito said, he explored with his actors “the parody of the excesses and hypocrisy of the Victorian era, and certainly we have excesses in our upper classes.”
He considered the play, universally viewed as the peak of Wilde’s dramatic writing, a perfect vehicle for his actors.
In a conversation before a dress rehearsal Tuesday afternoon, Algernon and Jack, played by Mychael Green and Robert Pease, confirmed they were having the time of their young theater lives.
Arch snob Lady Bracknell is often played in drag, here by Rashaan lackwell.
“This whole play embodies everything I love about theater. It’s hysterical because everything is blown out of proportion,” said Pease, who hopes to attend the theater program at Eugene Lang College at the New School in New York after he graduates.
Green, who played Hamlet in last year’s all-school play, is learning that farce takes as much if not more energy than tragedy to perform.
“The whole play is challenging, because if you don’t do farce right, it doesn’t hit,” he said.
The particular challenge: “Algernon is basically a silly man in a silly play that’s already over the top. You can’t be sillier than the play,” said Green, who also hopes to attend Lang College next fall.
How is he approaching the role? “Mr. Esposito says to just have fun. If I’m having fun bunburying, the audience will have a good time.”
Esposito said he has instructed his young thespians to go for the physical comedy, not just in the actions but in the words. “It’s not a sit-down farce, but [we’re finding] the movement in the words, vocal variations, playing with accents.” The cast is also sending up over-the-top high class British accents, of the kind you hear in Downton Abbey.
The other young actors in the high-flying cast include Orianna Cruz, Veronica Fletcher, Imani Manick-Highsmith, David Raccio, Nykese Thomas, and Benjamin Tramel.