‘Dorian Gray’ Is a Picture of a Broadway Masterpiece

“The Picture of Dorian Gray” stars the actress Sarah Snook, and only Ms. Snook. Calling it a one-woman show, though, hardly does justice to the magic trick of multiplicity she performs, a performance worthy of Oscar Wilde and his strange and seductive tale of innocence lost. It takes nothing away from Ms. Snook’s performance to note that she shares the spotlight with Wilde’s preening prose, so sparkling that it could charge its own admission.This edition of “Dorian Gray” has been adapted for the stage by Kip Wells. His canvas is Ms. Snook’s shape-shifting charisma. The star of “Succession” has already garnered an Olivier Award for performing this role at London. That’s where the Dublin-born Wilde — his family were members of the Anglo-Irish intelligentsia — flowered into full force as a Victorian sage, and a scandal. A conviction for “gross indecency” sent him to prison. Wilde blended hedonism with a grounding in Greece. A prodigy in the Classics at Trinity College, he went on to study at Oxford at the learned feet of John Ruskin and Walter Pater. “Dorian Gray” is his only novel, but he attained fame as a playwright with works like “Salome” and “The Importance of Being Earnest.” Essays like “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic as Artist” are permanent expressions of his vision.That perspective is often captured in the phrase “art for art’s sake,” but that undersells Wilde’s interest in the link between ideas and pleasure. That relationship thrums through “Dorian Gray,” a Gothic fairy tale. Basil Hallward is a painter whose subject, Dorian Gray, is a young man of great beauty. Gray meets Lord Henry Wotton, whose hedonism is captured in his aspiration “to cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul.”Sarah Snook in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray,’ adapted, directed, and written by Kit Williams. Marc Brenner via the Press Room NYC Dorian, petrified that his beauty will fade — it always does — utters a perverse prayer that the portrait age will remain young. The wish is granted, at the price of his soul. Gray embarks on a spree of libertine pleasure that ends in his own death. Wilde wrote in a letter that the book “contains much of me in it — Basil Hallward is what I think I am; Lord Henry, what the world thinks of me; Dorian is what I would like to be — in other ages, perhaps.”Wilde has Lord Henry quip: “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” It is easy to imagine Ms. Snook’s performance being the talk of Broadway, even as stars like George Clooney, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Denzel Washington ply their craft before live audiences. Ms. Snook plays a grand total of 26 characters, her Australian twang thrumming with a high Victorian pep in its step.Ms. Snook is assisted in her transformations by an armada of video screens and a cavalry of cameramen, a deployment of cinematic flair that is fast becoming de rigeur on Broadway. Sometimes the screens merely zoom in on Ms. Snook’s face. Her eyes are equally fluent in parody and pathos. At other times, they allow for the staging of a full dinner party attended solely by Ms. Snook in various costumes. The pleasure lies in the illusion hardly being airtight.The audience never sees the portrait, but Mr. Williams, another Aussie, skillfully mobilizes today’s technology to convey Wilde’s message about desire and distortion. Ms. Snook takes selfies with the audience and uses filters to change her face with the seriousness of an Instagram influencer. One of the signature scenes of “Dorian Gray” takes place in an opium den, and the play captures the delirium of the drug with music sourced from a Berlin club.It would be easy for a play like “Dorian Gray” to become over-reliant on bells and whistles, but this production steers clear of retelling Wilde in an age of AI. The play’s beating heart is a satisfyingly analogue performance by Ms. Snook, who somehow both inhabits and comments on her characters. If the show is something of a fever dream of binging and Botox, it is one that could credibly claim to be co-authored by Wilde himself. Wilde was never one for a sermon, but he was curious about the negotiations people undertake with their desires, whether they be for youth or beauty, thinness or money, experience or an edge. “Dorian Gray” tallies the cost of these deals, but regret for Dorian only comes at the end. Elsewhere Wilde has one of his characters reflect on what, then and now, is hardly a unique portrait, saying: “I can resist everything except temptation.”

‘Dorian Gray’ Is a Picture of a Broadway Masterpiece

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