The Importance of Being Earnest

Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrief both lead busy double lives in the highest of style: creating false identities, avoiding family obligations, wooing well-bred young ladies, visiting imaginary invalids and (equally imaginary) wayward brothers. Now their carefully constructed “alternate universe” is crumbling at the edges, and they will have to decide whether being “Ernest” or “earnest” will get them what they want. Less than a year before persecution and scandal would destroy his career, Oscar Wilde produced his last and most beloved comedy. The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) offers a sly send-up of the cucumber sandwich set, and invites us into a world where artifice is everything, honesty is entirely passé, and truth is “never pure and seldom simple.”