In its 51st season, the Oak Park Festival Theatre stages two outdoor plays in rotating repertory for the first time. But the programming choices couldn’t be more famous or opposite in tone: “Hamlet” and “The Importance of Being Earnest.”
In two creditable, engaging classic productions — one appropriately moving, the other appropriately funny — the works come off as strangely complementary.
“’Seems,’ madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems’,” insists Drew Bos’s passionately earnest Hamlet in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s always-potent portrait of the conflicted young prince.
Compare that with how the knowing young Gwendolyn (Sonia Goldberg) embraces “seeming” in Oscar Wilde’s wit-fest about society and courtship as a never-ending show: “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.”
Peter G. Anderson, the company’s producing artistic director, helms “Hamlet” with a clear nod to the now — modern dress, contemporary sounding scoring – and a focus on emotional truth. Bos, a talented young actor who just finished his first year as a grad student at Yale, delivers a near-emo Hamlet, emphasizing the character’s youth, existential angst and frequent self-loathing.
For most of the show, this comes off as highly compelling. Bos invests Hamlet’s soliloquies with a visceral specificity: He squirms as he wishes his flesh would “melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.”
But “Hamlet” is a hard play and among the hardest parts. In this case, every speech and scene work in isolation, but Bos and Anderson never quite locate, or at least communicate, a convincing psychological throughline.
The production is more successful in this regard with Ophelia, Hamlet’s doomed potential match. Olive Gallagher beautifully traces the character’s path from smitten with Hamlet, then loyally obedient to Polonius (here gender-swapped into her mother and played with fresh honesty and empathy by Patrice Egleston), and ultimately mentally untethered.
There are many memorably executed scenes here, and not always the usual ones. I was taken far more with Hamlet’s rebuke to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Pedro Jimenez and Gabriel Armstrong) for trying to play him like an instrument, than I was with his more famed admonishment to the theatrical players on holding “the mirror up to nature,” and with the guilt and self-preserving manipulations of Josh Carpenter’s Claudius than with the apparent regrets of Jodie Gage’s Gertrude.
Speaking of nature, I’m ultimately not quite sure this take on the play was best conceived for an outdoor performance. Bos’s Hamlet might well have allowed for more nuance and shape if he didn’t have to battle the bellowing chorus of cicadas early in the performance I attended. And as the play swirls with action towards the end, using the vast park space for entrances and exits contributed to the feeling that the production dragged as it moved towards resolution.
On the contrary, the style of director Kathryn Walsh’s production of “The Importance of Being Earnest” — and, as Gwendolyn informed us, style is paramount here — fits perfectly with the al fresco environment. The play lends itself to camp interpretation, and for most of this show, the playing maintains a balance between that inclination and something still flamboyant but shaded with sincerity.
At certain points, though, that balance gets lost, and it feels like actors live in different worlds, even though the story relies on the two couples at the center of the dual courtships being ideally aligned.
Every individual performer has high points, and the rapport between foppish bachelor friends Algernon (August Foreman) and Jack (Chad Bay), along with the dry assistance of Bos as the servant Lane, gets us off to a fine start.
But the women here provide the high points and — was this always true? — the driving narrative force. Goldberg is an aggressively heightened, sophisticated Gwendolyn (Algernon’s cousin and Jack’s eventual fiancée). As country-raised Cecily (Jack’s ward and Algie’s eventual fiancée), a stand-out Aurora Penepacker provides a perfect combination of classy ease and conviction to the character’s romantic notions.
The star of this show, though, is Barbara Zahora as Lady Bracknell, who brings the show back into a consistent reality when Foreman’s overdone melodramatics as Algernon imbalance it. I’ve never seen a Lady Bracknell who pulls off a conspiratorial wink exposing a surprising self-awareness. I would not have thought it would work, but in Zahora’s hands it does.
Lady Bracknell, you see, is more complicated than she appears. For Algernon’s quote in “Earnest” applies, just as it does to “Hamlet”: “The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!”