�y��vlog

This workshop production pits two texts head-to-head: Oscar Wilde’s impeccable drawing-room comedy “The Importance of Being Earnest” and Moisés Kaufman’s 1997 play “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde,” which draws from court transcripts and newspaper articles to tell the story of Wilde’s prosecution for homosexuality.

It “is a most delightfully acted and gracefully entertaining film, fashioned much in the manner of a stage drawing-room comedy, that seems to be about something much more serious and challenging than it actually is,” Bosley Crowther wrote in his review for The New York Times.

A key character in Philip Barry’s 1928 drawing-room comedy “Holiday,” now on view at Arena Stage in a creaky if ably acted production, Johnny is a rising Wall Street lawyer who aims to quit working, so as to experience life’s fullness and find his own purpose.

“The Philadelphia Story,” that arch drawing-room comedy starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, was set in Radnor, and its public high school served as the inspiration for Rydell High in the film version of “Grease,” directed by a 1964 graduate, Randal Kleiser.

It’s a pleasurably discombobulating experience, sometimes playing like mordant drawing-room comedy and sometimes flirting with expressionist nightmare, as when Welles’ dark silhouette looms over a bedridden Mank and his mummified leg.