The Importance of Being Earnest - January 31 - February 02, 2014
Mercy High School
Earnest Character Info
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Ryan Pflug
as "Jack" John P Worthing
Jack has grown up to be a seemingly responsible and respectable young man, a major landowner and Justice of the Peace in Hertfordshire, and is a pillar of the community. For years, he has also pretended to have a younger brother named Ernest, whom he is always having to bail out of some mischief. In fact, he himself is the reprobate brother Ernest. The fictional brother is Jack’s alibi, his excuse for going off to London to escape his responsibilities and indulge in exactly the sort of behavior he pretends to disapprove of in his brother. More than any other character in the play, he represents Victorian values. Wilde was satirizing through Jack the general tolerance for hypocrisy in conventional Victorian morality. Jack has used Ernest as an escape from real life, but Gwendolen’s fixation on the name Ernest obligates him to embrace his deception in order to pursue his desires. He has always managed to get what he wants by using Ernest and his lie eventually threatens to undo him.
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Kellen Berg
as Algernon Moncrieff
Algernon is closer to the figure of the dandy than any other character in the play. A charming, idle, bachelor, he is brilliant, witty, selfish, amoral, and given to making delightful paradoxical and epigrammatic pronouncements that either make no sense at all or touch on something profound. Like Jack, he has invented a fictional character, an invalid named Bunbury, to give him a reprieve from his real life. Like Jack’s brother Ernest, Bunbury provides him with a way of indulging himself while also suggesting great seriousness and sense of duty. His delight in his own cleverness and ingenuity has little to do with contempt for others. Rather, his personal philosophy puts a higher value on artistry and genius than on almost anything else, and he regards living as a kind of art form and life as a work of art. Unlike Wilde’s other characters from his plays, he is completely amoral; he has no moral convictions at all, recognizing no duty other than the responsibility to live beautifully.
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Catie Doran
as Lane
Algernon’s servant. When the play opens, Lane is the only person who knows about Algernon’s practice of “Bunburying.” Lane appears only in Act I. Lane is the typical stuffy Victorian Housekeeper. Servants were imperative to the functioning of middle and upper class homes in Victorian England.
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