by - bjblakeslee (Fri Apr 28 2006 04:08:22 )
"The Unbearable Lightness and Importance of Being Ennis"
Plot Synopsis:
Jack Twist was a doctor and a man's man in 1960s Czechoslovakia. Now Jack is a pillar of the community in Hertfordshire Wyoming, where he is guardian to Lureen, the pretty, eighteen-year-old granddaughter of the late Thomas Zardoz, who found and adopted Jack Twist when he was a baby.
In Hertfordshire, Jack is a proper man with proper responsibilities: he has a number of servants and other employees all dependent on him. For years, he has also pretended to have an irresponsible black-shepherd brother named Ennis who leads a scandalous life in pursuit of pleasure and is always getting into trouble of a sort that requires Jack to rush to his assistance. In fact, Ennis is merely Jack’s alter-ego that he has invented so he can do socially reckless things while in the city. No one but Jack knows that he himself is Ennis. Ennis is the name Jack goes by in Signal, which is where he really goes on these occasions—to pursue exactly the kind of behavior he pretends to disapprove of in his imaginary brother.
Jack is pretending to be in love with Lureen Fairfax, the cousin of his best friend, Monroe Moncrieff. When the play opens, Monroe, who knows Jack as Ennis, has begun to suspect something, having found an inscription inside Jack’s cigarette case addressed to “Uncle Jack” from someone who refers to herself as “little Alma.” Monroe suspects that Jack may be leading a double life: Ennis in the city; Jack in the country. He calls a person who leads a double life a “Aguirriest,” after a nonexistent friend he has invented, a chronic invalid named Aguirre, to whose deathbed he is forever being summoned whenever he wants to get out and be socially reckless.
Lots of people go in an out of doors and deliver rapid-fire dialogue like:
"What do you think of my harmonica playing, Monroe?"
"I didn't think it polite to listen, Ennis."
"I don't play with accuracy, anyone can play with accuracy, but I do play with wonderful expression."
"Did you see the expression on old Randal's face after he found out his wife died?"
"Yes, poor thing. He looked quite altered. I daresay, Ennis, he looked quite 20 years younger."
There are complications and mistaken identities and the usual hilarities. Eventually, all misunderstandings are straightened out and Jack and Monroe discover their mutual affinity and both end up being named Ennis and get married each other.
Jack, Monroe, and Alma are caught up in the events of the Prague Spring (1968), until the Soviet tanks crush the non-violent rebels; their illusions are shattered and their lives change forever. Jack acknowledges that he now understands “the unbearably light Importance of being Ennis.”