Play Review-The Importance of Being Earnest

On November 1st, I watched the play The Importance of Being Earnest in Cheshire Academy's Black Box Theater performed by Cheshire Academy students. Before watching the play, I have never read about the story of The Importance of Belong Earnest. This is a quite educational play. The main characters of the story are Algernon Moncrieff ( played by Aaron) and  John (Jack/Ernest) Worthing, J.P.(played my Tas). They both demonstrated the personalities of their character really well. I knew Aaron is a great actor. However, Tas really surprised me by his mature acting skills. I always thought of him being a shy person. I now know how wrong I am about that. He is really active on stage and he projects his voice well which made it easy to understand his lines and the emotions that he tried to convey while saying those lines.

This play is an about a story of two boys that make up an imaginary person that they talk about when they need excuses or reasons to explain or hide the things that they do. For John (Jack/Ernest) Worthing, J.P., he made up a cuisine named Earnest and he tells people that every time he goes into the city, he visits his cousin. The other main character, Algernon, makes up a person called Bunbury. Whenever he tried to escape something he doesn’t want to do, usually assigned by his aunt, he tells her that his friend is really sick and he has to go and take care of the friend.  Once a person had made a lie, he has to make lots other lies to cover this lie. Later in the play, both of their lies were discovered.

My favorite character of the play is Algernon. This character is selfish and playful. He is never serious in front of anyone. I do admire his theme of life, being who you are and leave all the struggles to others. However, that is not the reason I like this character. I liked the character because of the way it was performed on stage. Aaron is a perfect fit for this character because as much as I know him, he does have a playful character within him. During the performance, he definitely let that part of him took control and brought the character to life. Another skill of Aaron's that impressed was how clear his lines were regardless of the amount of food that was in his mouth. He was always eating something on stage. However, none of his lines were covered by mangbling. 

Even though the play did have a happy ending, the same outcome will not apply to everyone. Lying regardless of form or purpose is not good. The irony of the story is that the name of the play is The Importance of Being Earnest while the main characters lie almost the whole play. The true theme of the story is The Importance of Being Honest, however, the director used the opposite approach of showing how lying is unacceptable to remind people to be honest all the time.

The lighting and the music of the play are both appealing. Moreover, the new set up of the Black Box was another big success of this show. After rearranging the setup, the Black Box actually looked more like a theater. Bother the horizontal and the vertical distance of the stage are enlarged, which provided the actors more space to move around and act freely.