In Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Algernon Moncrieff has invented an imaginary invalid named Bunbury so he may "go down into the country whenever I choose." But in the fantastical world of Tom Jacobson—a place in which distinguished literature and literary genres reign supreme—there is a Bunbury. The only problem is that he has no idea he's fictional.
As Jacobson's astonishingly bright new play opens, Bunbury (played with passion and elegance by Sean Wing) ponders the love interest of Shakespeare's Romeo before he went to that darned ball. "If he had kept mooning over Rosaline, he'd be alive today," but, alas, Rosaline is only a plot device, never appearing onstage. "She's less than fiction," he argues. "She's subfictional." Soon, a young lady in Renaissance garb, speaking in iambic pentameter (Ann Noble), arrives unannounced. Boy, is she pissed off. Rosaline convinces Bunbury she's more than just a "few drops of ink," and together they journey back to save the classic lovers in their tomb, inadvertently changing the course of all literature in the process. Back in Earnest-land, Cecily (Stephanie Stearns) prophetically surmises of Romeo and Juliet's permanently altered ending, "Why, if they'd died, half the marriages in the world would end."
Traveling among Poe's The Raven—now a peacock who says, "Anytime"—Streetcar's Blanche, and Virginia Woolf's George and Martha, Bunbury realizes what they've done. They embark on a mission to correct their correction and help Bunbury prove that even if he is fictional, he's not a trivial character, nor is anyone else in the world. This is the stuff of which classic theatre is made: extraordinarily clever yet ultimately touching and deeply moving.
The play is gorgeously mounted, acted, and designed, featuring uniformly excellent committed performances and sharply visual staging by director Mark Bringelson. Still, the star is Jacobson. As Bunbury and Rosaline sweep through time and literature, his audience's collective imagination is also swept up in the ways in which the world can change. A hundred years from now, people could refer to complex and ingeniously twisted great works of art as "Jacobsonian."
"Bunbury," presented by and at the Road Theatre Company, Lankershim Arts Center, 5108 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Thu.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 2 p.m. Sep. 30-Dec. 4. $20. (866) 811-4111.