The Importance of Marrying Well$: Wilde-ly Clever

Forget about wit, it takes a lot of moxie to dare write an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest set in contemporary New York. One of the English language's funniest comedies, who would be fool enough to not only invite comparison, but to offer comparison a chair, pour it a cup of tea and feed it cucumber sandwiches?

Playwright Dana Slamp would be fool enough, and that's lucky for us because her resulting comedy, The Importance of Marrying Well$, is a gloriously funny parade of farcical romance and bitchy bon mots.

You needn't be familiar with Wilde's classic to be laughing throughout director Nancy S. Chu's lightening-paced ninety minutes of upper crust antics, but those who are will easily recognize parallel characters and plot points, plus some clever one-liners very much in the style of the original text.

"There are only two kinds of successful artists in this town... starving and dead." So rich kid Jake Ashen (Antony Hagopian) fakes poverty in order to make it big in the elitist world of post modern creativity. His interior designer friend Gavin (Michael Malone), who is "so over being over everybody" despises the snobby Bohemians of Jake's Williamsburg neighborhood ("The L train has become so exclusive you can put a velvet rope at the entrance and charge a cover.") and prefers to be among the wealthy denizens of Connecticut. Demand for his services has been booming every since he made up a story about being unhappily married to a Royal Canadian Mountie (legal above the border). Seems they only like gay people if they're married because only then they can be as miserable as the straight folk.

In a bow to Sheridan's The Rivals, Jake is in love with the wealthy and perky Gwyn (Cheryl Lynn Bowers) who adores him as a starving artist because it gives her a chance to rebel against her parents. Her father, it seems, has been on his deathbed for the past ten years -- ready to go at any moment -- and it's his one wish that his daughter marry well. To complicate matters, Gwyn's mother, Mrs. Goring (Celia Howard), knows Jake as a wealthy heir and has hired Gavin to spruce up the Christian Girls College the family owns.

Add to the mix a starry-eyed pretty boy named Ceasar (Peter Macklin) who comes from a country so backward that "the men there wear mustaches without any hint of irony", a sex-crazed therapist (Maria Deasy) and and over-worked lawyer (Brian Russell) and you get sublime lunacy delivered by a well-oiled cast that seems to be having as much fun as we are.

Michael Malone gives a standout performance in a plum role blessed with plenty of the best lines. All charisma and attitude, he snaps out dishy wise-cracks like a flaming Groucho Marx.

As is the trend nowadays, The Importance of Marrying Well$ contains a smattering of self-referential moments where the characters show awareness that they're in a play. A stage manager (Jere Williams) even enters from time to time with book in hand, ready to assist. Some may groan that such routines have been done to death, but here they're approached with a zippy, light touch.

Dana Slamp has moxie, that's for sure. She's also got a talent for hilarious quips and well-crafted farce.