THEATER REVIEW / ‘THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST’ : The Wilde Life : Santa Barbara’s Ensemble Theatre brings to the stage the clever witticisms and banter of the Victorian era-playwright.

It’s a regrettable fact that the plays of Oscar Wilde are often more fun to read than they are to watch. Elegantly crafted lines like “In married life, three’s company and two is none” are almost too pure for spoken dialogue--it takes an Oscar Wilde to say them convincingly.

Where some playwrights expand their sensibilities to include different types of characters, Wilde requires all his characters--men and women--to be Oscar Wildes.

Maintaining the author’s distinct tone without lapsing into rarefied artifice or broad farce is the daunting challenge confronting any production of a Wilde play. Add the distance wrought by a passed century and a bygone Victorian sensibility and the task might seem foolhardy.

Yet “The Importance of Being Earnest,” Wilde’s signature play, is frequently staged--most recently by Santa Barbara’s Ensemble Theatre. And while the result doesn’t completely overcome these obstacles, there’s much to admire and enjoy in the attempt.

Particularly effective is director Robert G. Weiss’ emphasis on the women characters’ capacity for self-determination. Hardly the mere decorative objects of the men’s idealized pursuits, both Gwendolyn (Amy Love) and Cecily (Dena Anderson) control their circumstances with insight and skill. The men may prevail in finance and politics, but in matters of the heart, these women have the upper hand, whether in eliciting marriage proposals or punishing deceptions.

In this case, the attempt by each of their would-be suitors (Christopher Vore and Michael Rathbone) to win their hearts using the desirable pseudonym of Earnest Worthing has drawn swift retaliation. Yet these women know how to reel in their fish.

“They have been eating muffins,” says Cecily. “That looks like repentance.” And so the chase resumes.

The inverted values of Victorian society receive the most biting of Wilde’s satirical barbs, as this production makes admirably clear. “The amount of women who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous,” opines Vore’s effete dandy Algernon. “It’s simply washing one’s clean linen in public.”

Rathbone’s love-struck Jack sums up his inadvertent lapse into virtue in the closing moments of the play: “It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that he has been speaking nothing but the truth.”

But it’s Gretchen Evans as Lady Bracknell who sums up a whole culture’s vapid hypocrisy in her pronouncement that “In matters of grave importance, style--not sincerity--is the important thing.”

Evans’ timing in the role is impeccable, and she avoids the temptation, which would spell disaster, to overindulge.

The men pick up steam as the evening progresses. The initial repartee between Vore and Rathbone seems particularly mannered--they only hit their stride when they’re able to inject genuine feeling into their characters.

The flowering of romance despite social obstacles is elegantly framed in Robert L. Smith’s versatile set, which opens up with puzzle-box intricacy for the respective London flat, country garden and drawing room locales.

Still, the opening night performance couldn’t completely shake the sense of uneasy wrestling with alien material, and some uneven accents undermined the illusion of time and place. The production nevertheless catches enough of Wilde’s brilliance to delight.

* WHERE AND WHEN

“The Importance of Being Earnest,” performed through March 21 at the Alhecama Theatre, 914 Santa Barbara St., Santa Barbara. Performances are 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $14 to $16. Running time is 2 hours, 15 minutes. For reservations or information, call 962-8606.