Playwright: Oscar Wilde

Director: Sharon Ott

Costume Design: Christopher Goode

Scenic Design: Jenn Pallas & Chris Raintree

Lighting Design: BJ Wilkinson

Photography: Aaron Sutten

Second place winner of SETC’s 2023 Undergrad Costume Design Competition

In the famous preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray;  Oscar Wilde said the phrase “All art is quite useless”.  While perfectly tongue-in-cheek and paradoxically true when appearing in a novel, this sentiment is also reflected by the philosophy of “art for art’s sake” —a philosophy that reflects the opulent extravagance of the British Aristocracy when Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest first appeared onstage in  February of 1895. These concepts were at the core of our design team’s first meetings, and we quickly agreed that the Art Nouveau movement of the 1890s-1910s was one of the best ways to elegantly reflect this. With its graceful, distinct linework, decadent patterns, and natural color palette, we thought that this style was perfectly paired with a play coined as a “trivial comedy for serious people”.