“‘Til those lights come up, and we hear that crowd— and we remember why we came.” Jackson Browne, “The Load-Out”, Running on Empty.
The theme of Furman Theatre’s 2025-2026 mainstage season was “the seen and unseen.” Scheduled performances included the deceptively deep A ClownShow, a heartful production of the new musical Between the Lines, and a dance show titled HumanKind: Be Both. The third of four mainstage productions was The Importance of Being Earnest, directed by professor Rhett Bryson and performed in late February.
Earnest stands out somewhat among this catalogue as a fairly well-known classic. Written by Oscar Wilde and produced in 1895, the play chronicles the nonsensical arguments and interplay between members of Victorian upper class, satirizing English polite society.
The character John Worthing lives a double life as his dudish fictional brother “Ernest” in the city and “Uncle Jack” in the country, allowing him to pursue urbane hedonism while away from his responsibilities at his country home. Complicating things further is his friend Algernon Moncrieff, who, after eavesdropping on a conversation between Jack and his ladylove Gwendoline Fairfax, appears at the Worthing estate claiming to be Ernest and soon wins the affection of Jack’s ward, Cecily Cardew.
Things are again thrown further into disarray by the arrival of Gwendoline and later her severe mother, the aristocratic Lady Bracknell. Through a twist of fate and the reunification of a spinster governess and her beloved handbag, Mr. Worthing realizes the vital importance of being earnest.
Wilde’s drawing room comedy was thrust into the center of the Playhouse, Furman’s long-standing temporary theatre arts building, staged with wheeling tea carts in the city and garden gates in the country. The cast was able to partially replicate the attitudes of the original cast thanks to accent coach Jayce Tromsness, who guided the cast through a number of regional English dialects. The importance of the lingual form cannot be understated— bringing the audience into the lyrical time and place that British humor requires is a necessary prerequisite to portraying Wilde’s genius.
Given the stated theme for the year, recognizing the effort that goes into art, both what is seen and unseen, is a natural progression. Graduating seniors involved include Cian Colgan as the flamboyant Algernon Moncrieff, Sara Mack Lowe as the mercurial Gwendolyn Fairfax, and Matthew Sides as the cynical butler Lane. Among the crew are Meg Dollar as Prop and Crew Head, Lila Dawson on the props crew, and Annie Dykstra running the box office. Over forty students lent their names and efforts to the project, though not all of them are pictured above.
Live theatre requires ushers, wardrobe managers, designers, coordinators, and a variety of other specialists that play their part in bringing the words in the script off the page. The work of the student-company is entirely unpaid and even those who only assist for class credits ought to be commended.
I recall the moment that the last line of the show was uttered one night, the sound of a hundred breaths being held, the spackled darkness of those black-paneled walls waning like the night before the dawn, and the leonine roar that swallowed both time and space afterwards. The company and the audience can, on occasion, tap into a great something together that cannot be truly recorded with an inkpen or keyboard. There is more to the art than the art itself; every person involved has their own role and artistic honesty—earnestness— is absolutely required, especially in the theater.
Furman Theatre Arts is seeking six to ten million dollars to renovate the Playhouse and promises to improve the space, add accessibility features, increase the available seating, and install cutting-edge stage technology for the sake of both the art and the curriculum. Earnest sold out its entire run rather quickly, and while such an event recurring is quite desirable to the box office, modernizing the facilities will allow Furman Theatre to reach an even greater audience. Further information can be found at https://www.theplayhouseproject.org/.
