SHERBURNE – The Sherburne Earlville High School drama club is in their final stages of rehearsal for Oscar Wilde’s comedy, “The Importance of Being Earnest.” Regarded as one of the greatest playwrights of the Victorian Era, Wilde wrote and produced nine plays. This play, being one of his last written in1894, is considered by many as a comedy masterpiece and one of the wittiest plays ever written. The plot revolves around an ingenious case of “manufactured” mistaken identity.

Whenever Jack Worthing (played by Joe Mettler) slips away to London from his Hertfordshire estate he says he is going to see his wayward, but also fictitious brother Ernest. Once there he keeps his privacy by calling himself Ernest - luckily so as his beloved Gwendolyn (Ellen Fagan) declares she could only love an Ernest. Her cousin Algernon (Adrian Enscoe) is the one person who knows Jack’s secret and one day he travels down to the estate, announcing himself to Jack’s attractive ward Cecily (Stephanie Joyce) as bad brother Ernest. Cecily is much taken with him and with his name, so on Jack’s return home and Gwendolyn’s unexpectedly arrival it becomes clear there are both too many and too few Ernests earnestly courting. The rest of the cast includes Alison Bensley as Lady Bracknell, Kaitlyn Briggs as Miss Prism, Jake vonMechow as Dr. Chasuble, Ethan Cameron as Gribsby, Tyler Rundell as Merriman, Paul Weinell as Lane, Bekah Riley as Miss Moulton, and Brittany Clark is Assistant Director.