AN IDEAL HUSBAND: OXYMORON OR CONTRADICTION IN TERMS
AN IDEAL HUSBAND
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle.
Growing up in Central New York, one encountered only two minorities: the Irish and the Polish.
If truth were known, neither the English-Americans nor the German-Americas of upstate New York ever referred to either group with such neutral monikers.
The Irish, with nary a straight nose, uncauliflowered ear or seamless brow amongst them, were flagrantly called Micks or Monkies.
And as for the Polish . . . need we explain?
It seems that everyone yearns to feel like a majority, even if one has to invent a minority.
Then there was the Jewish man who fell over-board while cruising the South Pacific.
When rescued twenty years later, his rescuers noted that he had built two synagogues on his tiny atoll.
A rescuer approached the marooned man regarding the extra synagogue: "I can understand building one synagogue, but why two?"
The marooned man proudly retorted, "Oh that. That's the synagogue I don't go to."
Even on an atoll rising barely a foot above sea level, someone living in total isolation, fueled by a primal hierarchal imperative, can create a sense of moral, ethical, cultural or religious high ground.
Oscar Wilde lived his prolific years as a minority in London.
Had he lived in his native Ireland, there too he would have been a minority: an Irish Protestant.
In English Victorian society, the Irish—Catholic or Protestant—were entirely inferior to the English.
To some, the Irish were an inferior species; to the quasi educated: the "hibernicus" was touted to be Darwin's "missing link."
The Irish Scholar Declan Kiberd once stated, "If Ireland had never existed, the English would have invented it . . . "
Kiberd goes on to hypothesize that poetry and story-telling in Ireland served as an antidote to the political and intellectual suppression by the dominant occupying English culture.
In 1171 AD. King Henry II of England invaded Ireland and the English have continued to govern Northern Ireland ever since.
Think of it, over 800 years and the Irish are still bucking their annexation while the Mexicans of Alta California, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas have only been subjugated for 150 years and yet they are picking our produce, skimming our pools, tarring our roofs, painting our fences, cleaning our houses and tending our yards, as if the annexation happened while the Cordilleran Ice Sheet was in retreat.
The Irish are stubborn: their folk songs, poetry, prose, ethnic jokes, pipe bombs, sniper fire, Molotov cocktails, ambushes and satchel charges all reflect a dauntless antipathy for the English.
As an outsider—ensconced at the heart of all that is English i.e. London—Oscar Wilde saw the British ruling class through objective eyes.
With such detached vision, Wilde could "dissect, vivisect and eviscerate the rectitude of the British ruling class in sharply satirical plays such as AN IDEAL HUSBAND, THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST, A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE and LADY WINDEMERE'S FAN."
Many of Wilde's leading characters are leisure class rotters: effete parasites that are too rich, cultured and educated to be called parasites and so they are given titles like Lord, Duke, Duchess, Sir, Lady, etc.
While these rotters may have temporarily celebrated Wilde's genius and brilliant dexterity with the English language, they smiled waiting in patient ambush to restore him to the proper place of the Irish.
The California Shakespeare is currently performing AN IDEAL HUSBAND.
The play reflects life at the very nucleus of the British Empire: at that miraculous and brief time in World History when a group of dandies from small island off the coast of France were able to mysteriously muster the where-with-all to grab the entire planet by the cajones and to plant the Union Jack into one third of the Earth's real estate.
You might ask yourself: what were these dandies and their fawning and fetching ladies were doing while the planet groaned beneath the onerous British yoke?
A satirical and ironic answer to that question is provided, with all the necessary irony, by Oscar Wilde.
The big question of the $4.75 per gallon, ice capless summer, is: Why are you driving to Ashland?
Greenhouse gases and fuel pump penury aside, this play is superb.
Read the bios of the cast, duh.
Ashland? Been there! Done that! Everyone of them.
Take Elijah Alexander for example—he plays Lord Goring—a brilliant actor, a comedian, handsome, strutting, arrogant, macho, nuanced: his comedy is in the physical and in the spoken: gesture, expression, movement, posture, timing: every element of his acting points to laughter.
Elijah has a bio that reads like WHO IS WHO AMONG AMERICAN'S GREATEST ACTORS: it should.
You can drive your Lincoln Navigator from Tierra del Fuego to Point Barrow and not find comedy like this.
And what about Stacy Ross who plays the nefarious MRS Cheveley?
Hey, let's hope she IS just acting or else some guy is going to need a pre-nuptial contract as thick the L.A. phone book and one that's underwritten by both the California Bar Association and the Gambino Family.
If you are still licking your wounds and sorting your pocket change from your last divorce, you need to see Stacy do Cheveley—suddenly you will feel like the moon is in the Seventh House and Jupiter aligned with Mars.
And speaking of comedy: Danny Scheie has restrained himself to the extent that he plays Vicomte de Nanjac and Phipps.
Seeing Danny show such caution so as to avoid upstaging the principals, is like listening to a Ferrari V-12 with eight of its ignition wires pulled.
Director: unleash that man!
Grab the ole wicker picnic basket, some fetid cheeses, Ciabatta and couple bottles of a rustic pinot grigio muy frio and make haste for Bruins Theatre in Orinda.
Call the box office at 510-548-9666 or surf over to info@calshakes.org.
U.S. Naval Aviator and Lieutenant Commander Retired
Math Teacher at Encinal High School A.U.S.D.
San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle
Sidewalk Politician and Arm Chair Liberal
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