LESS THAN EARNEST.(Oscar Wilde)

Of the many joys and miseries that buoyed or afflicted Oscar Wilde's soul, becoming a practicing Catholic was not one. Wilde's mother, the Irish nationalist-leaning poet and critic Lady Jane "Speranza" Wilde, insisted that her son be baptized in the Catholic faith, but Wilde's father, the surgeon and writer Sir William Wilde, took young Oscar's religious education in hand, ushering him into the Protestant Church. ("All women become like their mothers," Wilde wrote. "That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.") While still a student at Dublin's Trinity College, in the early eighteen-seventies, the young poet with distinctly Hellenic leanings did have a brief flirtation with the Eucharist. But, as Richard Ellmann points out in his expansive and sympathetic 1984 biography, Wilde's interest in the Catholic Church--with its robes, its incense, and its ritual of taking in the body of Christ in wafer form--was, for the playwright-to-be, an early manifestation of a passionate curiosity about form and spectacle.

Ellmann is too even-tempered a writer to mention that Wilde's attraction to Catholicism may have had something to do with his fascination with power. Wilde fell under the sway of Cardinal John Henry Newman's 1870 tract "Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent" soon after the Vatican declared papal infallibility, thus conferring a certain unimpeachable grandeur on the Catholic faith. Like the iconoclastic, ambitious Lady Wilde, Oscar, who eventually took his degree at Oxford, wrote out of a sense of his own difference--as a homosexual Irishman in England--but with both eyes fixed on those powerful institutions (society, marriage, the Church) which not only satisfied his need for convention but provided him with ample material for satire. ("Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon," Lady Bracknell cautions in "The Importance of Being Earnest." "Only people who cannot get into it do that.") Wilde's habit was to heckle from the back of the class while wearing expensive velvets and brandishing a lily. Until he was convicted on charges of gross indecency, at the age of forty, in 1895 (when both "An Ideal Husband" and "The Importance of Being Earnest" were already hits in London's West End), Wilde experienced little social ostracism. He was as certain of his place in society as any closeted homosexual who is taken up for his "naughty" views on the luxurious world of gossip and furbelows can be.

In a collection of epigrams titled "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young," Wilde wrote, "The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered." Like Wilde, the characters in "The Importance of Being Earnest" (in revival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theatre) are less interested in naturalism than they are in the great divide between what people say and what people do. "The Importance of Being Earnest" is both an English drawing-room comedy and the playwright's ultimate revenge on the English drawing room. One can read it, in a sense, as Wilde's social and spiritual autobiography, emblematic of his desire to be liked both for his lighthearted effervescence and for his A-student's adherence to correct dramatic form. It is the record of a man who knew less about who he was than about how he wanted to be perceived.

The play opens, at BAM, on a beautiful set by Kevin and Trish Rigdon. The colors--all blues and whites and browns--suggest the bloom of youth, which Algernon (Robert Petkoff), in whose home we find ourselves, happens to be enjoying. Slightly plump, munching on cucumber sandwiches, Algernon also plays the piano, as he acknowledges, not accurately but "with wonderful expression." Algernon has a chum, the somewhat intense Jack Worthing (James Waterston). The strange thing is that Jack also appears to go by the name of Ernest. "You have always told me [your name] was Ernest," Algernon says. "I have introduced you to everyone as Ernest. . . . You are the most earnest-looking person I ever saw in my life." But appearances deceive. Jack has a reason to call himself Ernest in the city and Jack in the country. In the country, he ...