For the second time this spring, I’m called upon to speak up for The Importance of Being Earnest — the play, that is. Back in March I offered appreciation for the charming production still playing at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

However, Kamilah Bush’s adaptation, now enjoying its world premiere at Portland Center Stage through June 29, offers special delights: Besides the production’s many funny and nimble touches, Bush has found a way to illuminate the more subversive elements that have always lurked in playwright Oscar Wilde’s most famous but — as I now better understand — still underappreciated play.

As many theatergoers will already understand, Wilde was a complicated character, navigating the complexities of elite London society as a witty, stylish gay man at a time when veering outside heteronormative lines could subject one to criminal punishment. Indeed, Wilde experienced such punishment himself shortly after the premiere of his most famous play; he was tried and convicted of “gross indecency,” which then carried a two-year prison sentence. 

But The Importance of Being Earnest wasn’t part of the literary evidence used to bolster the crown’s case against Wilde. It was then, and still is, very effectively cloaked in the garb of a conventional comedy of manners centering on two privileged straight couples finding their way to each other via manufactured misunderstandings and witty dialogue. With the deftness of one well-accustomed to expressing himself in code, Wilde produced a play that would offend no one who mattered, and yet still contained delights for those who (officially) didn’t.

In especially helpful program notes for this production, however, dramaturg Taylor Barfield illuminates elements of what he terms the “homoerotic underbelly” of Wilde’s comedy, “rife with jokes and allusions for London’s underground gay community of which Wilde was notoriously a part,” including codes and slang long used by gay men there. They include the name “Earnest” itself, which both of the play’s male leads assume in double lives; the word was a Victorian code phrase used by gay men to identify other gay men. And the invented term “Bun-burying” is homoerotic word play designed to amuse those in the audience who know what to listen for. 

In adapting the play, Bush (who also serves as Center Stage’s literary manager) smartly updates it, with the goal of giving us the play Wilde would have produced had he been in a slightly more welcoming world. She succeeds admirably, with queer coding that becomes more openly celebratory as the play unfolds. 

Just as in the original, the two male leads, longtime intimate friends who bicker and invade each other’s spaces, pursue the two female leads, who quickly bond over common passions — but before long we see the real sparks flying between the two male leads and the two female leads, revealing more complicated objectives. 

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The world where Bush has set her adaptation — the District of Columbia in 1919 — was, and continues to be, a place where people bargain with wealth, identity, and reputation in order to survive. It’s a clever setting to depict such motivated angling.

The verbal and physical sparring here is fittingly colorful and coded, reveling in a variety of expressions of identity. Program notes describe Jack (Tyler Andrew Jones) as the “femme fastidious one” and Algernon (Philip Orazio) as the “masc party boy.” Both actors revel in the roles — and again, the ways the production turns up the volume just a bit on elements already contained in Wilde’s original heightens the play’s delights. 

To my mind, the women are a decided improvement on the original. Lo N. Steele is a much more uproarious Gwendolyn Fairfax than usual — even more so once we see sparks fly between her and the especially delightful Andrea Vernae as Cicily Cardew. With the aid of especially vibrant costume design by Camilla Dely, Steele portrays a woman dramatically displaying conventional femininity and then pulling it off layer by layer, inspired by her chemistry with Vernae. And Vernae nicely captures the sense of a young woman barely tolerating the roles expected of her, smart but also brash and impatient. 

Dely’s costumes are like a special effect, supercharging four energetic central performances. And Maria Porter, Jamie Rea, and Darius Pierce in supporting “straight” roles leaven this especially rich confection, supplying broad comedy and winks as needed and giving it all a satisfying bite.

The result of Bush’s well-placed adjustments, guided by Josiah Davis’s nimble direction, is a much more satisfying realization of Wilde’s accomplished work than I’ve seen before. She has found a way to help us appreciate what Wilde did in his day while also sparking delight in what we can enjoy in a context that will make room for more of the color and spice and even hysterics that come with fuller expression of love and identity.  May these layers of good work help us to imagine ever more fully.

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Kamilah Bush’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest continues through June 29 on the U.S. Bank Main Stage of Portland Center Stage, at The Armory, 128 N.W. 11th Ave., Portland. Ticket and schedule information here.

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