Moon Over Buffalo (Ken Ludwig), Lady Windermere's Fan & A Woman of No Importance (Oscar Wilde)

I originally slated these for separate posts, but after thinking on it realized that much of my thoughts echoed across them.

Both Moon Over Buffalo and A Woman of No Importance can be seen as moderate retreads of the author’s earlier successes (Lady Windermere’s Fan and Lend Me a Tenor) and the author’s in general can be seen as having a wide number of works without having a breadth in the variety of their work (at least according to me).

Which is to say Oscar Wilde does what Oscar Wilde does and is (mostly) celebrated for it, while Ken Ludwig applies his Ludwiggian filter and has also met with success (though probably not immortality).

At its best a formula can be seen as revelation rather than recipe and while many times the ire of people who lament artists “playing the same character” or “writing the same play” puts the blame on those artists- they just don’t have the talent, the ideas, or the bravery to try something else- I think this trend is just as well explained in the concept of audience capture.

The world is an uncaring place- it wants entertainment, and it extracts all it can. It can reward handsomely but can just as quickly turn its back on you. Artists, therefore, can easily be pigeonholed by the audience and be unable to find success (or support) outside of the niche they first gained prominence in. This is audience capture.

Ken Ludwig had dozens of unsold plays, rejected from everywhere and everyone, then he wrote Lend Me a Tenor- a bold farce about the backstage antics of an opera company struggling to cover up for the supposed death of their bank-making star. This catapulted Ludwig to fame and fortune on Broadway (such as it exists there). Is it any wonder that his future projects would play to the same crowd? It may be that he only knows how to tell one story. It’s equally likely that the world only wants to hear one story from him.

So too Oscar Wilde, who has one schtick (verbal reversal) which he applies constantly, often to great affect! The reason his plays are still revered is they still hit us in the same spot they used to.

Is this a problem? Hard to say. It’s almost like asking for substitutions on a burger, you can find the play that best suits your interests, theater on-demand. For my money I tend to tire of the Wilde Bon Mots quickly and Ludwig isn’t nearly as funny as he once was to me, but all three of the plays have something to recommend them.

Moon Over Buffalo
The basic Ludwig scheme is a tug-of-war between stability and normalcy or wacky and surprising, characters choosing or wanting to choose a “normal” life and being drawn back into a “wild” one, usually involving the arts in someway. Other traditional conceits are broken engagements, family strife, and people thinking they could be something if someone would give them a shot.

You can see this in Lend Me a Tenor, its distaff counterpart Lend Me a Soprano, Fox on the Fairway, Leading Ladies, and, of course, Moon Over Buffalo.

The Hays are an old theater couple who lost their shot at making it big in Hollywood a few years ago. They’re touring the provinces and have landed in Buffalo doing Cyrano and Private Lives. Their daughter has come to visit to introduce them to her new fiancee, and also runs into her old fiancee, who has started working for the Hays. A serious of contrived events (it is a farce after all) occurs sweeping through infidelity, mistaken identity, drunkenness, and divorces. In the end everyone is more or less ok, but the daughter has well and truly been drawn back into the world of theater.

Moon Over Buffalo has often been touted to me as the superior play to the better known Lend Me a Tenor, and I do have to agree that it seems like a tightened and cleaned version, the jokes are a little faster, tighter, involve more of the cast, etc. What it lacks, which Lend Me A Tenor has, is a neat moral to hang your hat on: whereas Max learns to believe in himself, no one in Moon Over Buffalo is asked to learn anything, and they don’t. They have a weird day that they then recover from.

Ultimately I didn’t learn much from it, though I am mighty tempted to produce it one day.

Lady Windermere’s Fan & A Woman of No Importance
I’m sure, I know, that entire graduate thesis can be hung on either one of these plays, but I have neither the time nor inclination to do so. Brief words on both will likely suffice since people are going to go and do Earnest anyway.

If Ludwig focuses on the tension between stability and the wondrous, Wilde focuses on what is proper and the lies and pain that can be hidden in tact. All of his characters are terribly considered with what is proper, what ought to be proper, what is boring, what is right, and reading his characters it becomes clear that Wilde would have had a brilliant career in the 90’s as an observational comic saying why men and women are different.

Although properly classified as a comedy of manners, and not as reliant on speed and hijinks as a farce, these plays have a similar love of contrivance as a farce.

Lady Windermere’s Fan concerns the titular character wrestling with doubting her husband’s fidelity after she learns that he has been spending time and money on a woman of limited esteem. He invites her to a party and through a series of situations the lady (Erlynne) covers for Windermere in a compromising situation and it is learned that she is Windermere’s mother who abandoned her at a young age. Erlynne has presumably been blackmailing Lord Windermere to keep this under wraps and her marriage to Lord Augustus at the end of the play ensures that this will happen.

This play has a remarkable amount of pathos and subtext absent in Earnest which I responded quite well to. The mystery is explained tediously by today’s standards, but the edgelordiness of the young Wilde and the variety of ways one can take the motivations of the characters created a show I liked much more by the end than at the beginning.

Wilde seems to stuck to the basic idea in A Woman of No Importance which can mostly be summarized as “long lost dad wants to get back into son’s life secretly”. While being far from boring it did take a much longer time to resolve into a coherent plot, being distracted as it was by all the quips flying back and forth. Is there more to say on this? Nothing truly speeds to mind.