When literary icon Oscar Wilde published his one and only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, in 1891, he was met with (at best) indignation and (at worst) outright censure. In the era of Victorian Britain, the Irish-born aesthete was castigated for the novel, with its contents labelled perverse, unclean, and poisonous in the obscenity trial that condemned Wilde to prison in 1895.
Now, 130 years since Wilde鈥檚 trial, it is time for a reassessment. The Picture of Dorian Gray, now running at Broadway鈥檚 Music Box Theatre through June 29 after a triumphant West End run, is holding a magnifying glass to Wilde鈥檚 tale of morality, indulgence, and the distortion of self.
Kip Williams, the director and adaptor behind the production (which transmutes Wilde鈥檚 288-page novel into a two-hour tour-de-force solo performance) first read the novel when he was 15. 鈥淚t and The Importance of Being Earnest ignited within me this conversation around gender and sexuality in Wilde鈥檚 work, and how he depicts the performance of identity. I became obsessed with it.鈥�
Wilde鈥檚 work percolated in Williams鈥� mind for years, through his ascension in Australia鈥檚 theatrical scene to become the youngest artistic director in the history of Sydney Theatre Company at barely 30 years of age. As the internet and the increasing presence of social media encroached upon the world, turning everyone around him into potential products to be packaged and sold鈥攊t was as if the contents of Dorian Gray were crying out to him from the locked room of his memory, insisting on renewed attention.
Dorian Gray is a somewhat straightforward reinvention of the allegorical Faustian bargain. An innocent young man believes that beauty and pleasure are the only aspects of life worth pursuing, and he wishes that his painted portrait would endure the ravages of age, leaving him untouched. His wish comes true, tempting Gray to explore every manner of vice and cruelty, his angelic visage unchanged as his hidden portrait devolves into something grotesque, until the weight of his conscience shatters his own perception of himself.
On Broadway, Williams鈥� adaptation is brought to life by Emmy winner Sarah Snook (Succession), who won the Olivier for her performance as all 26 characters within the play, where she acts across the spectrums of gender, class, and age.
鈥淭he greatest joy of this play, for me, is being a drag king. And I mean that in a very real, honest way,鈥� Snook chuckles. Through the use of extensive digital screens, careful costuming, and numerous wigs (including a decadently coiffed pompadour)鈥擶ilde鈥檚 range of characters test the limits of what one body can become over the course of an evening. Continues Snook: 鈥淚鈥檓 playing a lot of male characters, yes, but there鈥檚 also a lot of drag in how every character is presenting themselves, these constructions they show to the world.鈥�
Those mannered 19th-century identities are surprisingly similar to what modern-day humans are going through with social media and smartphones. It is impossible to escape our own image these days. For much of human history, a person could only glimpse themselves when consciously looking for their reflection in a pool of water or a pane of glass. But with the advent of cell phones and social media, almost all of us have a narcissian device in our pockets that allows us to both observe ourselves, and compare ourselves to others鈥攊n real time. For many under the age of 50, life events don鈥檛 truly exist until they have been captured on a screen.
鈥淭his novel is over 100 years old, yet the thematics of it are intensely contemporary. It's a fable that presents a world that's obsessed with youth and beauty and the individual and the pursuit of material gain. It's a piece entirely about the way in which we construct a performance of self that often is at odds with the true self that's inside us.鈥� Williams leans forward, fingers thrumming against the table in front of him with vigorous energy. 鈥淎nd in a world in which the mobile phone has made the idea of performing self an almost daily task鈥�Dorian has collided with the present day in the most thrilling way, where audiences can see themselves and the world they're living in through Wilde鈥檚 physical depiction of the relationship that we all have in every single millisecond of our existence with ourselves now. Dorian鈥檚 relationship to his portrait, that dialogue between them, is like one's own internal monologue or inner seeing eye. And for that reason, I think it will resonate for eternity, no matter how uncomfortable it may make us to face it.鈥�
While Snook is the only performer on stage throughout the evening, she is hardly alone. Fractured images of herself are projected on screens鈥攂oth captured live and pre-recorded, some captured through cine-cameras, others through a smartphone. It creates an inescapable hall of mirrors, a continuance of the self as it spirals out of control.
Says Snook: 鈥淭here is a point in the play where I, as the performer, get to see myself in a way that is a heightened version of who I am, in a beautiful sense. That heightened beauty can be really intoxicating, and it is fascinating to see how easily my brain can slip into that, but it is also terrifying.鈥� Snooks pauses, closing her eyes for a moment of brief reflection before continuing.
鈥淎nd then, there鈥檚 the opposite of beauty. I go through phases of comfort with being ugly in this piece. By the end of it, I am so exhausted from having run around on stage for two hours, non-stop talking鈥擪it does not want silence unless it is directed to be so.鈥� Both Snook and Williams laugh, the sound of their mirth briefly harmonizing. 鈥淭here's no way in those final moments that I can make myself look beautiful. And that鈥檚 a real fight in some ways, the actor part of me wishes I could just have time to wipe my nose, to look just a little bit nicer. But there is no time, and that's the point. It's the full degradation of Dorian, and dissolution of his physical, presentational self in front of the audience. It鈥檚 terrifying to express that freely, onstage, but it is also freeing.鈥�
As a woman existing in the public eye, Snook is constantly combatting external opinions on her self presentation. Instead of feeding into the machine, she's chosen to disengage. "I don't engage with social media. The only one I have is Instagram, and I try not to engage too much; I usually only re-share things, and I never read the comments...There's a part of me that doesn't want to contribute to the noise." Snook waves her hand in front of her face, demonstrating the dizzying array of images fighting for attention.
"And there's a part of me that thinks about my 15-year-old self, if I had been experiencing that level of noise that 15-year-old girls are experiencing now...They don't know that it is fully constructed. That gorgeous photo of myself at some event required two hours of hair and makeup, someone choosing a dress for me, tailoring it to me. Someone changed the lighting, someone framed the whole thing鈥攊t's a constructed image. And it's really hard to see through those things, even when you're an adult."
At points in The Picture of Dorian Gray, using a smartphone, Snook utilizes appearance-altering technology to modify her own image live. Low-cost phone applications like FaceTune, YouCam, and FaceApp have become so normalized for younger generations that, for many, natural aspects of the human face like pores, smile lines, and flyaway hairs suddenly seem repugnant. Especially when compared to the perfectly smoothed, tightened, and brightened images produced by those photo-editing software.
"I have done photo shoots where I didn't feel like I looked like the person in the photos. And that's dangerous to go down," Snook exhales through her teeth as Williams leans back in his chair, wincing. Snook says the more a person looks at an altered image of themselves, the more their true reflection can begin to feel strange and upsetting. "The neurons can change and reconstruct how you feel, so, so quickly. It's like an instant body dysmorphia. The only safe option is to not engage, as much as possible." That is, aside from in the show, where her utilization of the technology is specifically controlled and purpose-driven.
The two hour tour-de-force that Snook embarks on every night in The Picture of Dorian Gray took an immense amount of preparatory effort: this is no Gatz, which famously staged the entirety of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby by reading every single word from the original novel. Instead, Williams has distilled Wilde's original work down to its essential passages, which occasionally required the director to pick up the pen himself to adopt Wilde's writing style to create newly cohesive transitions.
"If the novel were to be read out loud, I think it goes for about 14 hours, or something crazy like that," Williams explains. "My first draft of the play was eight and a half hours long. And of course, the biggest task came in the choice to write this play for one actor, who would play all of the characters. It was a very clear, formal decision to express the paradoxical multiplicity that exists within all of us, which Wilde himself expressed. He would talk about the central characters as being the different facets of his own identity. But I'm also asking an audience to see the ways in which we play different versions of ourselves in different contexts, revealing and concealing different parts of our truth. That led me to the creation of the narrator character."
The Narrator, who is an embodied expression of the storyteller responsible for the fable itself, allowed Williams to zero in on his intentions, while also leading him to perhaps the most difficult impasse of the entire project. "A lot of the narrator's writing is my original work, which means I had to try emulating one of the greatest writers in the English language, which was terrifying!" Williams laughs, a slight lingering tension coming to the surface. "Talk about artifice. There are certain moments within the play where there's a tilt towards the contemporary world, but generally speaking, I'm trying to write in a way where you don't notice when it's not Oscar and when it starts to be me and vice versa."
Williams looks over to Snook, who gestures for him to continue with a smirk. "Honestly, I'm still terrified. In the initial runs of the play, I really downplayed how much I had written, to see if anyone noticed. And there are still moments in rehearsals, years down the line, where people go, 'That is a great line of Oscar Wilde.' But really, it's one of my lines."
Williams laughs again, his cheeks reddening. "The production is truly a paradox. It's Wilde, but it's also me. It uses contemporary technology, but it is fundamentally this very ancient form of storytelling, with one actor coming to an audience and telling them a story. For the length of the show, you do not lose contact with that ancient form and with that performer, for the entire two hours鈥攅ven as they split into some scenes where there's, like, eight of her. You still have one central live performer telling you the story...It's that pure, ancient form of storytelling, that can never go out of style."
Sarah Snook in The Picture of Dorian Gray
Sarah Snook in The Picture of Dorian Gray
Sarah Snook in The Picture of Dorian Gray
Sarah Snook in The Picture of Dorian Gray
Sarah Snook in The Picture of Dorian Gray
Sarah Snook in The Picture of Dorian Gray
