“You were the prettiest of playthings.” At those words, the audience gasped. It wasn’t so much a gasp as the air knocked out of us – a punch to the stomach and a collective heave.
The idea of women as a “plaything” might make this play fit perfectly in 2023. When the Asbury Theatre department chose to put on Oscar Wilde’s “A Woman of No Importance,” it was far before the cultural reset of Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie.” With the rise in conversation about modern gender issues, the timing of this production was particularly apt.
I asked Director Catherine Gaffney about these two stories coinciding and why she might have chosen to lean into that. “I thought that Greta Gerwig used wit and humor to help us lower our defenses.” In both “Barbie” and “A Woman of No Importance,” humor is a tool used to carry the story’s message. Gaffney highlights the play’s line “The world was made for men and not for women,” and says, “This line felt like it could have been taken from America Ferrera’s monologue which starts off ‘It is literally impossible to be a woman.’”
Lisa Weaver-Swartz is a sociologist, professor, and author of “Stained Glass Ceilings,” a book addressing gender in Evangelical spaces. In a talkback about the show, she broke down some of why this show may feel so heavy-hitting even today. “We’ve seen a lot of change,” she said, highlighting women’s suffrage and ability to now work outside the home. “But the thing we haven’t addressed is cultural power.”
The power dynamics in this show are what I refer to as “wet ink moments.” Moments where an old text is so relevant that it feels like if we touched the page, it was written on, our hands would come back ink-stained – like it could have been written today. This play highlights the power dynamics between men and women in a time when the imbalance was much more apparent than in our own context. Yet even when women had less overt power, the way the men in the play wield their power is subtle. The play’s subtlety highlights areas of our own context where we may see subtle power imbalances. The issue is that the subtler they are, the harder they are to address.
Wilde’s works always highlight the hypocrisy of high society. He knows all too well that society likes to be subtle about their injustices. The subtlety of most of the play’s display of power makes the one scene of deliberate oppressive power grab the audience. At that moment, you could have heard a pin drop in the Greathouse Theatre.
Gaffney uses her brilliance as a director to locate and enhance the themes already present in the text. Every decision that audiences see on the stage is intentional. “We always think of things as so fixed,” Gaffney said in the talkback. Gaffney shows us that things are not so set in stone through subtle decisions like putting Lord Illingworth in pink and Lady Arbuthnot in blue. Weaver-Swartz highlighted that this choice is not to be subversive. During the late nineteenth century, pink – a derivative of the power color red– was seen as more masculine. Blue was considered feminine because of its tranquility. We didn’t have our modern associations until the 1930s. This brings into question whether our understanding of gender might be less unchanging than we think.
Each one of these subtle creative decisions enhances the wealth of meaning already in this story. Wilde is famous for his lack of breathing room. With his Irish wit, he demands that the audience work to find truth – he doesn’t give it to us easily. English PhD Christopher Nassar writes on the complexity of Wilde’s messages and paradox. “Truth may lie somewhere in-between; it may be at one extreme or the other, or it may be totally absent or invisible.” Wilde’s trademark is writing epigrams that sound full of meaning but instead are complete nonsense. It takes the work of the audience to find when these sayings bear truth and when they’re just pretty words. Nassar writes, “What is not acceptable is that the reader should have a closed mind. The paradox is a key that helps to unlock such minds.”
In all his works, Wilde “holds a mirror to society,” as Gaffney likes to say. He highlights the hypocrisy that he sees. “A Woman of No Importance” highlights one specific hypocrisy in what was known as “the woman issue.”
“This play, written 130 years ago, makes it very clear that the status of a woman was tied to men,” Gaffney said. “Women were the accessory, and the rules that applied to women didn’t apply to men. A man who fathered a child out of wedlock has lived a charmed life, while the mother has been shielding her son from taunts and sneers by hiding away.”
It is easy to view the high society of Wilde’s world as a foreign land, but the foreign feeling of the play might just highlight the places where things haven’t changed. If we do the work Wilde asks of us, we might see how he and this show are holding a mirror to us, too.
Purchase tickets to a showing of “A Woman of No Importance” at the link: https://www.onthestage.tickets/show/asbury-university/650280126157050e33261600