The trilling, ironic tone of British wit, however, is suddenly cut short by the flat accent and plain earnestness of an American voice. And, as the foreigner begins passionately to denounce the British aristocracy and its values, a veiled figure, a woman dressed all in black, materializes out of the gathering gloom outside. In this ominous moment, the polished veneer of British society begins to show its cracks, and the play begins in earnest.

These events occur during the second scene of Oscar Wilde's A Woman of No Importance, which runs at the Yale Repertory Theatre through April 12th. This moment, one of the most beautifully and sensitively realized in the production, triggers the play's transformation from a typically Wildean comedy of manners to something much darker and stranger. The American heiress who scolds her British hosts sounds more like a character from a play by George Bernard Shaw, and the eerie woman in black feels like a sudden injection of Victorian melodrama into Wilde's more high-brow stage-world. Together, these two women drag their more polished peers down from the rarified heights of drawing room chatter--and turn this play into Wilde's thorniest.

The basic scenario is this: Lord Illingworth, a charming if morally repugnant politician, has accepted a local country lad, Gerald Arbuthnot, as his private secretary. Eager to deserve the attentions of a visiting heiress (the moralizing American described above), Gerald jumps at this chance at social advancement, but a dirty secret in his mother's past threatens to destroy his budding ambitions--just as a dirty secret in Lord Illingworth's past might turn Gerald permanently away from his boss and idol.

If I give any further plot summary, the play will surely be spoiled, but suffice it to say that the play quickly becomes one of Wilde's most schizophrenic, weaving together low-brow melodrama, middle-brow moral argument, and high-brow banter as it wends its way toward a fraught conclusion. It is a fascinatingly complex play, one where the bluntly puritanical American gets as fair a hearing as the stylishly naughty Brit, and one that will leave audiences with plenty to chew on.

The Yale Rep's production, under the direction of James Bundy, excellently captures the moral complexity of the play, thanks in large part to a solid cast that relishes the contradictions in Wilde's characters. Geordie Johnson, as Lord Illingworth, is particularly adept at balancing his character's cruelty, charm, and vulnerability. Bryce Pinkham, though, puts forward the most intriguing performance as Gerald Arbuthnot. With his odd physicality and naively transparent emotions, Mr. Pinkham leaves us scoffing at Gerald one minute and aching for him the next.

Kate Forbes and Erica Sullivan (as Mrs. Arbuthnot and Miss Worsley, the American heiress) meet with less success. They seem somehow uncomfortable or embarrassed delivering these women's most raw or sentimental speeches.

Not all of this is their fault. The play, as noted above, is schizophrenic. Miss Worsley's stentorian tones ("You shut out from your society the gentle and the good. You laugh at the simple and the pure") and Mrs. Arbuthnot's brimming sentiment ("Leave me the little vineyard of my life ... the ewe-lamb God sent me, in pity or in wrath, oh! leave me that") contrast wildly with the texture of the surrounding dialogue at times.

More crucially, though, director James Bundy seems to have directed his cast away from the play's stylistic rifts -- a move which leaves his actors less able to deal with the extremes of some of Wilde's dialogue. Indeed, great part of the play's interest lies in its wild swings from snark to sentimentality, from sentimentality to steeliness, and back, but this production retreats into a more cautious style than the play requires. Thus, the wit is less sparkling, the melodrama less fraught, the argument less sharp -- all, seemingly, in service of greater fluidity. I'm not asking for pure frothy opulence on the one hand, nor for mustache-twirling melodrama on the other, but this production doesn't seem to relish the stylistic quirks that make the play so interesting.

The visual design of the show also comes up a bit short. The cramped middle-class sitting room that Lauren Rockman has designed for the fourth act of the play, which takes place at the Arbuthnot home, is wonderfully tacky -- I only wish the rest of the settings had such specificity and character.

Ultimately, though, this is a solid production of an underappreciated play. Early in the play, Lord Illingworth quips, "One should never take sides in anything, Mr. Kelvil. Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore." After seeing this knotty play, I can assure you -- by Illingworth's calculus -- you will be a perfect bore in no time at all. Enjoy!