Downtown Art  Share this: By: Anna Pratt Anna Pratt  'The
Rivals'  Like Jane Austen, playwright/politician Richard
Brinsley Sheridan draws complex charades around the comedy of
love (but with more fight scenes, typical!).  Set in Bath,
England, "The Rivals," condemns conventional wisdom founded on a
phony class system and small-mindedness. Through the stories of
two pairs of adolescent lovers, Sheridan addresses money
snobbery with the characters' fraternity antics, and, while he's
at it, has some semantic fun.  Action revolves around Lydia
Languish whose capacity for the counterfeit love of piles of
trashy romance novels makes you dizzy whilst she's pursued by a
trail of screwball suitors and overseen by her loquacious
supervising aunt, Mrs. Malaprop, who gives meaning to the word
malapropism (an actual derivative).  Sheridan's spoof reverses
business as usual, though, when Lydia sets her sights on a poor
man, Captain Jack Absolute, a.k.a. Ensign Beverley, who's
disguised himself as a down-and-out officer.