A quiet, under-reported revolution has taken place on Broadway. Live streaming, massive video screens and technology that creates digital reproductions so intense that you see every pore and pimple now fight constantly with the human voice and body for domination and your hard-earned money. Oscar Wilde’s buttons would have popped right off his well-tailored waistcoat. Had I been wearing one at “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” so would have mine.
But Sarah Snook, the truly formidable star of the new solo Broadway adaptation of Wilde’s 1891 gothic shocker, wrestles all of this technology into submission as she plays every character who appears, or even so much as gets mentioned, in the novel about a beautiful young man who falls into hedonism and debauchery but retains his youth and beauty by transferring the ravages of time and sin to his portrait.
Many folks will be attracted to the show because its Australian star played the much-bamboozled and bamboozling “Shiv” Roy in HBO’s “Succession.”
But Snook is as complete a creature of the stage as her countrywoman Cate Blanchett. Snook’s performance in Kip Williams’s self-penned production is powerful in every way, an exquisitely crafted melange of determination, drive and cheekiness. On the night I saw the show, she did not drop so much as a syllable. And yet there was nothing automaton about her work, which was just as well given all of the screens that surrounded her. She’s brilliant, alive and fun. All at once.
I should note here that the aforementioned tech has added a new dimension to one-person shows specifically. Not all of “Dorian Gray” is live in the usual sense. Snook is on stage the whole time, but the dialogic sections of the text are rendered by her talking to a prerecorded digital version of herself, playing such characters as Basil Hallward, the artist compelled by Dorian’s singular beauty, Lord Henry Wotton, the dangerous pal who becomes his amoral avatar and the poor actress Sybil Vane, whom Dorian seduces and destroys.
Those digital selves are rendered on separate screens of various shapes and sizes, aptly resembling pictures in, say, the National Portrait Gallery. They’re kinetic, flying in and out, landing at different angles, sometimes rendering whole bodies in silhouette and, at others, offering a series of characters at a gossipy table. All are richly realized, down to the mutton-chop mustaches (in some cases) or the elaborate headwear (in others) All, of course, are played by Snook. Unless you saw this piece in London, I doubt you will have seen quite the like before.
To what end, all of this, beyond the chance to see a bravura performance from an actress on the cusp of greatness? (An end in itself, I’d argue).
As a novel, “Dorian Gray” is many things: a satire of Victorian hypocrisy and smoldering desire, an aspirational manifesto for the gay 1890s, a horror story designed to shock. Wilde said he split himself into three characters: “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps,” he famously wrote. And he found a metaphor in the ever-changing portrait that was easy for readers and audiences to grasp and understand: how great it would be if old pictures of us all aged, instead of our bodies and souls.
Williams stays mostly away from that famously morphing portrait, a memorably chilling piece of the 1945 movie, as in all the various other dramatic adaptations over the years for stage and screen. I suspect he felt like that had been done or inevitably resulted in cliche. Moreover, his impulse in this production is far more post-modern, so to speak, evident of a desire to deconstruct Wilde’s famous story and its place in 20th century literature and, with Snook’s help, scramble everything.
SImply put, you don’t get one portrait at the Music Box Theater, you get scores of them, all chattering away at you.
I guess that’s a way of making WIide’s point, but I resisted it a little. I missed the old kind of Gothic creepiness; the kind that is not based in our fear of robots stealing our lives. What I felt at the show mostly was due to Snook’s performance, whereas in an ideal world you leave shivering, sure, but also thinking a bit more about mortality and how age ravages beauty. Here, there’s too much going on for that.
Such are our times. “Dorian Gray” features extraordinary video work from David Bergman and, while there is not much set, the endlessly witty costumes are exquisitely designed by Marg Horwell, Of course, some of the show’s costumes are seen only digitally; we’ll have to see what the awards committees make of that.
I guess it won’t make much of a difference. These days, live bodies and digital images of them have fused in our collective storytelling. I never saw a show where that was more clear.
