Every year Mer takes at least one field trip to see some literature-related theater. This last Tuesday, we went with almost all the senior class, plus Mer’s junior students, to see Actors’ Summit’s production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

I was excited to see the play; it is one of the funniest plays in the English language, and the previous week the director had come to CVCA to speak to some of Mer’s students about the play. He stressed the importance of timing and of getting the lines exactly right, since the play depends on sudden reversals of language for plot twists and for most of the humor.

We pretty much filled the theater, and on the whole, the students behaved very well. The director did speak to one student who was quietly talking during the introduction of the play, and that more or less warned the rest of us to keep quiet. The set was simple, with a few pieces of furniture and a back wall/door at the back of the thrust stage. The wall/door could be rotated to a second set to suggest the change of location from a London home to a country home. Over the whole set was the word “Ernest” in two-foot-tall letters, and the lighting designer used lights to highlight the word. I liked the lighting design (the shadows of “Ernest” being cast were subtle and cool), but I thought the word hanging in our faces like that was a bit too much; I thought it would have been more subtle to use just the shadows created by the lights, but it was a minor point to quibble with. The wall/door part of the set was excellent, with good detail.

The casting of the play was very good, especially the two male leads. They stayed in character and delivered their lines smoothly and with good wit, and they played up physical humor without being distracting. The play was wonderfully funny, and it was an excellent production.

After the play, the director and some of the actors had a question-and-answer session with us that lasted about twenty minutes or so. I felt as if our students asked some good questions, and the answers from people involved in making the production were interesting to hear (about learning lines, about set design, etc.).

After we all got out of the building (the theater is in downtown Akron, and is on the sixth floor), we got on the buses and headed to Chapel Hill Mall, to their food court, for lunch. Mer and I got to sit with a few colleagues and chat. We had about an hour total, and were able to spend about thirty minutes talking and laughing. Everyone got on the buses more or less on time, and so it was a Wilde-ly (ha!) successful field trip.