Justify Your Existence  Subtitled "A Trivial Comedy for Serious
People," The Importance of Being Earnest is Oscar Wilde's
airiest confection, a bite-sized meringue delectable with melt-
in-your-mouth epigrams. Though its tart center tastes of class
resentment and the exhaustion of necessary dissimulation, the
play draws the sweetest of conclusions—namely, that self-
invention is a natural phenomenon, and worthy of celebration.
Winkingly focused on a pair of bachelor dandies juggling double
identities, Wilde's drawing-room farce was also something of a
cryptogram, and it happened to debut on the London stage the
same year the writer's own design for living was so cruelly
condemned. Earnest triumphantly opened in February 1895 and
sheepishly closed in May, during Wilde's trials for "gross
indecency"; weeks later, he entered Reading Gaol, and never
wrote another work for the stage.  For Oliver Parker, the
importance of adapting Earnest lies in the text—not the context,
and certainly not the subtext. Much like his