Credit the directors of two on-going productions for making them sparkle and delight. They are Ted Pappas at Pittsburgh Public Theater and City Theatre’s Tracy Brigden. Pappas has come up with a jolly, fresh version of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” and Brigden has done all kinds of good things in the world-premiering “Hearts are Wild,” by George Griggs and Darrah Cloud.

Generally, when you attend performances, you probably don’t think often about directors. After all, you can’t see them. You see actors. And normally, you don’t think about how the directors were involved in those actors’ interpretations.

You are probably already aware, though, that how actors play actually comes through the director’s wishes. Actually, only the cast and other people backstage know for certain what the director has done and what the performers themselves have invented. Quite often, the interpretations turn out to be collaborative. That works best when the directors’ and actors’ conceptions match, causing the overall style to come together in one memorable result.

In both shows, we don’t need to know who did what, but we must credit the directors for how everything turns out.

Pappas had the bigger challenge. He took on a famed script that has been heard, seen and admired repeatedly for 110 years. Sure, audiences might want to experience it more than once. It’s a classic. As with works by Shakespeare, Shaw and Sondheim, all playwrights whose words are as important as the context, re-visits are always justified. But each visit contains expectations.

In the case of Wilde’s play, audiences are used to emphasize style and form, given that the play itself sends up a culture in which style and form themselves get excessive attention. Many productions of “The Importance of Being Earnest” resemble verbal cricket matches, where players continually score points by expertly delivering non-stop aphorisms, comments and clever observations, as if that is what the whole thing is about.

Clearly, surface behavior and pretense abounds everywhere in the play. And it’s easy to realize that Wilde was lampooning that aspect of English life. Pappas does not attempt to point up the satirical elements. He needn’t. He has the text played for itself: a lively, ingratiating comedy, rather than a comedy of manners, about manners. In fact, you may see and hear things in the dialogue you hadn’t noticed before. Pappas has his actors play everything, much like real people. In this case, the brittle dialogue is delivered as if the characters can’t help saying what they feel and think, and, if they speak fluently and well, it comes from being upper class.