Jack (Tim Hassler, second from left) and Algernon (Ross Cowan) go after girls, and each other, in “The Importance of Being Ernest Hemingway.” (Nikki Delhomme)
“I’m sick to death of cleverness,” exclaims a character in the cutely titled “The Importance of Being Ernest Hemingway.” But while the line comes from Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” it might be uttered by theatergoers forced to sit through this self-conscious mash-up of texts by the two writers being presented by the M-34 theater company.
The conceit of this piece co-created by James Rutherford and Elliot B. Quick is to present a skewed version of Wilde’s comic masterpiece as filtered through a prism of Hemingway’s trademark bluster. The central characters Algernon and Jack are not fops, but rather macho men who engage in boxing and wrestling matches, and the wittily brittle dialogue is interrupted at one point by a lengthy monologue about bullfighting.
The homoerotic subtext of Wilde’s play is also brought to the surface, with the two men interrupting their romantic pursuits of women to engage in a torrid kiss.
Besides its punning title, there’s little originality in the piece, which varies wildly in tone and style. Such silly touches as the men serenading their romantic conquests with a crooning rendition of “It Had To Be You,” a valet periodically ringing a bell to cue dialogue and an excerpt from Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” in which the Civil War is described as having been all about repressed homosexuality, add little to the proceedings.
What might have made for a provocative college term paper falls thuddingly flat onstage. Whatever points the creators are trying to make about the nature of masculinity are undercut by the amateurishness of the staging and performances, with the youthful ensemble struggling to embody their archetypal roles.
Running more than 2 1/2 hours — in a theater without air conditioning — “The Importance of Being Ernest Hemingway” never manages to overcome the preciousness of its ill-advised concept.