Experience Victorian era comedy at Gulfshore Playhouse

There’s barely a theater company in America that doesn’t have The Importance of Being Earnest somewhere in its repertoire, past or future; it’s such a delicious temptation to do. Oscar Wilde’s arch comedy skewers English society in white gloves, but with barbs so well-aimed and abundant it’s surprising Brittania’s upper-crust didn’t self-exile in mortification after it was published.

This month Gulfshore Playhouse yielded to that temptation and put Earnest on its own main stage The result is a lavish theatric spread that must have been a romp for the creative staff as much as the actors. Linda Buchanan’s richly colored sets lay out a drawing room in burgundy with rose overtones and a garden brimming with green that easily converts, with art nouveau wall panels, to a library. Kirche Leigh Zelle’s costumes are Victorian splendor on a mission: Lady Bracknell’s basketball-size leg-of-mutton sleeves actually work as weapons.

They also emphasize the redoubtable character of the play’s matriarchal figure. Augusta Bracknell may be only the aunt, but everyone needs her permission before they so much as serve a crumpet. Bracknell is the family’s arbiter on marriage, which will get tricky when her daughter Gwendolyn falls for a commoner of unknown parentage, an adoptee who was — horrors! — found in a handbag in Victoria Station.

The plot is insanely implausible and just as insanely hilarious. It revolves around the romantic comeuppance of two young dandies who dodge their social obligations with “duties” to look after an invented friend, Bunbury, or a profligate brother, Earnest. Their stories start bearing down on them when both fall in love with women who think they are one of their fictitious characters.

Much of the humor in Earnest is less shaping the plot than delivering playwright Oscar Wilde’s wonderful shots at Victoriana’s vacuous elites.  (“The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I’ll certainly try to forget the fact.” “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.”)

Primarily in the first act, this production doesn’t serve that well by ramping up physical expression and turning its horseplay a little too fey to make its characters, especially Algernon, sympathetic. It takes the arrival of the formidable Lady Bracknell to tone things down, and Kate Eastwood Norris nails the role with a panache every Mother Superior dreams of. Her Bracknell is a bellwether for withering wit; every scene is about to get a lift when she enters.

Bracknell has two of the best proteges ever in her niece, Gwendolyn Fairfax (Kate Marilley), and her would-be niece-in-law, Cecily Cardew (Ella Olesen). The two exude the confidence of beautiful young women whose preoccupation with romance would never hinder their looking after their own best interests. (“I never change — except in my affections.”)

The overdone first-act mugging aside, the two women have equally vapid partners in Algernon Montcrief and John Worthing. James Evans and Tony Carter create two comically self-aware versions of the idle rich — those gentlemen-in-training who belonged to a fraternity in college you wouldn’t dare aspire to join. And they couldn’t have better service than from Michael Ehlers, who deftly pivots from stone-faced butler to harried tea server in the two households.

But some of the funniest exchanges come from Karen Peakes as Miss Prism, Cecily’s tutor, and Richard Hollis as the Rev. Canon Chasuble. These two are so proper they likely keep their underwear on for their baths. But when they attempt conversation with each other, they continually drop unintentional double entendres and only burrow in deeper trying to extract themselves.

The Importance of Being Earnest is a sidesplitting reminder that moral superiority is inevitably accompanied by an idiot perspective. This production, from Kristen Coury as director, generally serves that moral elegantly.

You don’t have to go expecting only drawing-room giggles, either; there are outright throw-back-your-head-and-howl laughs here. So undignified of us.