An Aestheticist's Anguish

Seeing the person who told you time and time again, always irreverently and arrogantly, that your life was entirely devoid of beauty and replete with artifice publicly humiliated in a court of law should be at least somewhat satisfying. Yet in Moises Kaufman's Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, where the audience is witness to the "Trial of the Century" in which Wilde is accused of being a "posing sodomite," public humiliation reminds us just how closed-minded a society can be, even with regard to one of its famous personalities.

Armed with the advantage of historical perspective, this production of Gross Indecency makes two things clear-that there is more to the trials of Oscar Wilde than his homosexuality and that public humilitation, in this case at least, creates only pity and dismay. At the same time, the play remains humorous and manages to showcase its talented cast.

Director Jesse Kellerman '01 asked for a challenge with Gross Indecency, a recent play staged for the first time in 1997. Its runs in New York City and San Francisco have kept the professional theater community buzzing about the play's strength not only as a piece of theater but also about the difficulty of sustaining a courtroom drama whose energy comes from rhetoric rather than action.

From the start, Gross Indecency's talented cast and simplistic but functional set design envelop the audience in the unfolding tale. The walls of the Loeb Ex, adorned with pages of Wilde's works, serve as a continuous reminder of Wilde's influence. Yet no set is needed, for the actors are successful in leading the audience in a trip through Wilde's memory. Lighting changes mark the transition of time, distinguish between locations and mark the importance of each speech through a clever system of backlights and spots. We may never leave the physical space of the courtroom, but the lights guide the audience to hotels, ship galleys, restaurants and private dwellings.

Fred Hood '01 is simply outstanding as Wilde. No accent slips endangered this Brit, and his stage presence, one of self-righteous arrogance, convincingly meets the delivery demands of Wilde's clever epigrams. Yet Hood is just as equally successful as a lovesick Wilde, willing to do anything for Lord Alfred Douglas, or Bosie (Shawn Snyder '03), whose father, the Marquis of Queensbury (Paul Monteleoni '01) begins the mess with his charges of "posing sodomite."

Wilde, against the advice of his friends and lawyers, including George Bernard Shaw, pursues a case of criminal libel against Queensbury for the sake of Bosie, who sees the trial as a chance to get back at his mother. Bosie's stage presence is nearly perfect; with the walk of a public school boy and slight hints at effeminacy, Snyder successfully relates Bosie's demanding and selfish desire for Wilde's complete devotion.

Though Queensbury's polemics are occasionally melodramatic, his voice rising in pitch too quickly to sustain the rest of the speech, he successfully develops the attention-starved, almost crazed qualities the part requires. Stephen Fritsch '03, whose Irish accent is nearly impeccable, overcomes the fact that he looks nothing at all like Shaw and becomes the endearing rotund, white-haired, and belligerent playwright.

Though it's clear that Kaufman researched Wilde, for we are continually provided with sources for the dialogues, diary entries and speeches, some of the evidence, especially in the courtroom, tends to drag. It is difficult to tell if Sir Edward Clark (Seth Fenton '01) purposly reads each piece of evidence with as little emotion or sense of sentence flow as possible so that Wilde's exchanges sound juvenile or if Clark is merely reading the evidence unintelligibly.

The play moves through the trials, with Wilde's libel suit ending without resolution, prompting the Queen to bring up charges of "gross indecency" to court, a result of the evidence provided in Wilde's first trial. Between the first and second trial, we flash forward to a scene between a narrator (Dan Rosenthal '02) and Marvin Taylor (Liz Janiak '03), a New York University professor. Taylor makes it easy to laugh at the implications of Wilde's trials, especially given the pretentious delivery that is reminiscent of a bad English lecture. Yet the time warp does not seem out of place in the context of the play, nor is the scene entirely without purpose. Janiak, despite the facade, reminds the audience that homosexuality did not exist as a concept before 1890 and also explains the failure of Wilde as a champion of gay rights.

The second and third trials are more of a showcase of Wilde's fine mind than anything else. We hear epigrams that sound familiar, pieces from De Profundis, Wilde's epistle on the trial proceedings, and we watch his demise from self-assured man of arts and letters to groveling, humiliated and saddened accused criminal.

The power of the four narrators, who throughout the play substituted in various small roles and aided in the time and place change sequences, comes to full circle at the end of the play. Though the show is traditionally cast as all male, Janiak and Kalappa don't even make gender an issue. Instead, the narrators aid to the ensemble nature of the play, most evident in its closing minutes. A throbbing heartbeat, a single spot and green sidelights illuminate Wilde as he grovels for mercy though he has done nothing wrong. The full cast, a phrase at a time, relates Wilde's The Balland of Reading Gaol, a story of one whose heart was pure but who suffered at the hands of a judging society, rendering the play profound and Wilde's larger-than-life image even stronger than before.