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AE Home Video Essay Of course, in the19th Century urban setting of Wilde’s English play, this upward push of class identity would not come without an enormous price, and in many ways this can be said to be what his play is actually all about. In order to enter the upper-class, one must display all the refinement that this newfound status was meant to betray. Jack, the protagonist of Wilde’s play seems altogether contemptuous of all the pomposity that London and modern life has to offer. But this is not at all lost on Gwendolyn, the woman that he intends to marry. It is to her for whom this new modern idealism is all just a part of what makes him such an attractive suitor. She seems to express this right away. â€Å"We live, as I hope you know, Mr. Worthing, in an age of ideals. The fact is constantly mentioned in the more expensive monthly magazines, and has reached the provincial pulpits† (Wilde, 1895) Thus at times Jack steals away to the countryside where he can be more of himself; even as he has convinced others that he is Earnest. When his best friend Algernon asks him why he goes away he tells him â€Å"When one is in town, one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. † (Wilde, 1895) It is almost as if he means to say that poverty or better, the remoteness of the country setting offers him a more realistic outlook upon life than the smugness of London. For a time, almost effortlessly he uses one identity to escape one world and another identity to escape the other. Soon, we discover that Algernon has incorporated the same manner of fantasy into his own life. In Sure Thing culture, class, and status are triggers which appear to deliver attributes to strangers meeting each other for the very first time. Betty sits in the coffee shop reading a book as Bill attempts to approach her. Here, the affirmation of what is good or bad worthy or unworthy is often elicited from the audience’s response to the dialogue, as if post modern urban Americans have all but learned to pimp a bogus sense of idealism no different from Great Brittan more than a century ago. This is a world where a first impression maybe all that you have, and thus win or loose you only get once chance at failure, as Ives takes us through a drama that often resembles several rounds of speed dating. We hear his instant desire for acceptance when Bill makes several attempts to correct his earlier mistakes, as in this exchange: â€Å"Where was college? † â€Å"Oral Roberts College† (Bell) â€Å"Tech† (Bell) â€Å"Metro† (Bell) â€Å"Harvard† â€Å"Do you like Faulkner? † (Ives, 1988) This is a play meant to involve the audience as a part of the cast as well. As we look on, it is the judgment of the bell that gets our approval one pick up line after another. Ives does not have to bring the cynicism; we all know that this is all simply about sex and nothing more. What else could it be? He leaves the rest up to us to decide. It is the familiar game of boy meets girl and predictably she holds all the cards. Still, we are intrigued by the scenario, because in a sense it forces us to take a cynical look at ourselves and just what governs what we consider to be proper in our own lives. There is really no escaping it. While Bill has to spend the entire play going through the motions in order to discover just what it will take to get next to Betty, Jack ultimately comes to realize in the end that he actually is. There is no shortage of symbolism in either of these plays. Indeed, perhaps the saturation of metaphor is put immediately on notice with the title of Wilde’s play; The Importance of Being Earnest. In the end, we discover that this has much more meaning that we may have been led to believe. Although they wrote one hundred years apart, both of these writers attempt to place male-female relationships in a number of ‘what if’ situation, and both in their very own brilliant way force us to look squarely into the mirror of our own lives. You just have to ask yourself at some point: What motivated my own relationships? What was I searching for? Have I gone about this in the right way? They make us question the world and they make us think; sometimes they do a good job of making us laugh as well. Isn’t this what any good literature is supposed to do? Both of these plays take pains to provide us a view of the sometimes agonizing acrobatics that can often attend an encounter of boy meets girl. They are bold statements about the weight that outside social forces often have on intimate relationships. We have seen how the rise of the middle class in 19th Century London society had a strong effect upon human relationships. In a sense, we have discovered just how The Importance of Being Earnest was actually a response to the pretentious neurosis of the landed gentry of the UK during that time. So too, in Sure Thing, we were made to examine what we have learned about relationships in the aftermath of the sexual revolution. Here, we saw just how the fast-paced exchange of two strangers encountering one another for the very first time, forced the issue of the social and class perceptions during the waning years of the 20th Century. Even though these two playwrights wrote a century apart from one another, through our analysis of the plot and the motivations that undergirded both of these masterpieces of the stage, we were able to see just how much they actually had in common. Bibliography AE Home Video (Release Date: July 26, 2005) Biography: Oscar Wilde Ives, David, (1994) All in the timing: Six on-act comedies. Dramatist’s Play Service. (2008) (Director) Jason Salazar. Sure Thing as performed by the pigeon player’s theatre company. Retrieved at: http://www. youtube. com/watch? v=XliV9M7-If4 Wilde, Oscar (2004) The importance of being earnest. Ist World Library