The Importance Of Being Earnest

The notion of reworking The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde's classic if severely conventioned 1895 play, using a modern-dress African-American cast while retaining its London setting and most of Wilde's trademark epigrammatic dialogue is an idea whose time should never have come.

This ill-conceived and artificial updating concerns the comic misadventures of two young aristocrats, Algernon (Wren T. Brown) and Jack (Daryl Roach), who each take on the name Ernest in order to snare two comely ladies, Cecily (Lanei Chapman) and Gwendolyn (Chris Calloway), who will only marry men bearing that name. Standing in the way of both men is the impervious Lad...