6-10-LB-MacEarnest

Lisa Wolpe, founder of the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company, has garnered raves for her productions of Shakespeare classics with all-female casts. In recent times, she says, the talent of certain male actors she knows has prompted her to cast them in her productions-but not always in male roles. The result is the Wicked Wilde Shakespeare Festival, a “wild” and “shake-it-up” experiment in cross-gender acting.	Cynthia Beckert - Lisa Volpe
Four plays are currently in repertoire. The two reviewed below are Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (not the Bard but worthy of being transgendered); and MacBeth 3 (an adaptation with a cast of three). The other plays are The Tyrant’s Tale (an adaptation of The Winter’s Tale) and Lovers and Madmen, a series of scenes from Shakespeare. In all of these plays, some roles are assayed by actors of the opposite gender, while other roles are played by members of the “correct” gender. Theatre-goers get to see two plays an evening (they’re all about an hour long). Earnest, frequently performed and always diverting, is given great treatment by Wolpe and company. In addition to directing and adapting, Wolpe plays the title role of Ernest/Jack, the serious man with two personae, one for the town where he courts socially prominent Gwendolyn, and one for the country where he minds his ward Cecily and tells her about the doings of his bad brother Ernest in the city. As Ernest, Wolpe is amazingly convincing as a man. I don’t mean to disparage the fact that in real life, as seen in her photos, she is obviously a woman. Through an uncanny use of her voice and body language, she really comes across as male—and also captures the edgy aura of a man who has lived down to his name through constant dishonesty.
Cynthia Berkert, who plays Ernest’s buddy Algernon, comes across as slightly more androgynous, but that goes well with Algernon’s dandyesque personality. Katrinka Wolfson and Laura Covelli provide realistic femininity as Gwendolyn and Cecily respectively. The show-stealer, however, is John Achorn as Lady Bracknell. The role is always the center of attention—Lady Bracknell has many of the best lines! (In fact, Wolpe had to put some of the great one-liners back into her adaptation so that it actually runs an hour and 15 minutes and is almost the original text). Achorn is massive under yards and yards of flowered fabric and huge hats, and his performance is perfect as the grande dame without being at all campy.	Laura Coveli - John Achorn - Katrina Wolfson
Another famous “lady” of theatre appears in MacBeth 3. Kevin Vavasseur, who does well as both the butlers in Ernest, plays Lady MacBeth, and again, avoids the obvious temptation to camp up the role. His Lady is sensual, seductive, and seems to be missing a few bricks right from the gitgo. This Lady MacBeth uses her feminine charm rather than being scary or a pest, to urge her hubby on to murder and power grabs. The play, one of Shakepeare’s shorter works, has been shortened even more in Wolpe’s adaptation and since there are only three actors (Vavasseur also plays Satan; Andrew Heffernan plays MacBeth, and Scott McRae plays everyone else), the rapid pace and blurring of character identity may prove confusing even to those who know the play well. The dramatic device of Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane has been dropped due to the small cast and the scenes with the Witches are abbreviated also.
Heffernan plays MacBeth with a lot of bluster, on a continually worked-up pitch that goes well with the speeded-up pace but seems to lack subtlety. We never really see the full evolution of MacBeth from passive to overly aggressive. McRae comes alive best in the final scenes as MacDuff (he’s especially effective in the scene where he learns of the slaughter of his family). And seriously, this must be said: Vavasseur’s Lady MacBeth wig is one of the worst-looking fright wigs of all time. It distracts from his performance. Although in medieval Scotland, such bad hair was probably common.	Scott McRae - Andres Hefferman