Oscar Wilde’s infamous antihero Dorian Gray probably would’ve loved to have a barrage of cameras pointed at him, reflecting his gorgeous visage. This is exactly what Kip Williams’ tech-heavy new Broadway production does, with Sarah Snook (“Succession”) starring in all the roles and surrounded by a team of camera operators. However, despite some fancy camera work and close-ups, this production only goes skin-deep. Wilde himself was an aficionado of artifice, which makes the irony here all the more painful, since this production cannot find any depth in its surfaces.
“The Picture of Dorian Gray” — which played to much acclaim in London last year — creatively integrates video, with Snook often appearing on screen both in simulcast and in pre-recorded bits as other characters. Although technology is a ubiquitous part of this production, the piece has practically nothing to say about it, other than acknowledging its mere existence — technology is related to vanity, and a front-facing selfie camera is like a mirror. These basic ideas, far from revelatory, never come close to the trenchant critiques of hedonism in Wilde’s 1891 novel.
This is the rare revival that is worse for those familiar with the source material, who are bound to be disappointed. Williams seems to have fundamentally misunderstood the novel, or at the very least to have only a diluted grasp of it. While there is a general sense of fidelity to the plot, the final product feels wildly different from the original because the production is played as a broad comedy. Snook’s various characterizations, especially her minor characters, are so caricaturish they veer into British panto. Throughout, Snook hams for laughs, turning Wilde’s witticisms and epigrams into slapstick. The tone is well established but nowhere near that of the novel; instead of a gothic, nightmarish parable, Williams and Snook treat it as a frolicking, satirical romp.
Figuring out when exactly this production takes place is a losing battle. Dorian at one point starts using an iPhone, face-tuning a selfie and applying Snapchat filters as a stand-in for the infamous portrait, which ages while Dorian himself remains youthful. It’s unclear if this iPhone is meant to be diegetic, since the production otherwise appears to be set (like the novel) in the late nineteenth century. Later, though, two pre-recorded videos feature characters using iPhones; perhaps this is an exaggerated version of the story’s time jump, yet it’s unclear why the characters are still in Victorian clothes.
It’s a missed opportunity not to set this production in modern day, which could have allowed it to make more nuanced points about social media and its relationship to gender, sexuality, aging, self-image, body dysmorphia, and the glorification of youth and beauty.
The costume design (by Marg Horwell) takes a whimsical approach to the period, but eventually becomes gaudy and confounding, with Dorian ending in what can only be described as bad Elvis drag. This look is topped with a swirling pompadour, one of the production’s many hideous wigs. The most egregious is the wig Snook wears as Dorian for the first half of the play, a curly, blonde, clownish mop. It’s completely wrong for the character, styling Dorian into a petulant cherub instead of the drop-dead gorgeous, swaggering sex symbol he’s meant to be in Wilde’s conception.
Regardless of the direction any adaptation wants to take the story, it is vital that the audience is attracted to Dorian: He must have an undeniable sexual magnetism. Snook’s Dorian, though, has no sex appeal, and the sexual tension between Dorian, Basil, and Henry — the core triangular relationship of the text — has here been almost entirely eliminated. The very basis of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” is Dorian’s beauty; he is meant to be the exemplar of a Victorian twink whom everyone lusts after. Snook’s Dorian is not an aesthetic ideal — he is a joke, giggling as he takes a selfie flashing a peace sign.
Snook’s accent work throughout the play – which, to her credit, includes creating distinct voices for a wide array of characters – does the show no favors. Her Dorian sounds like a British child in an SNL skit; her “narrator” is a farce of a stuffy English voice-over; her Basil has a shaky stutter; and her minor characters have such exaggerated vocal inflections it appears the only inspiration was to get laughs.
The task for Snook here is by no means easy. However, in tackling it, she flattens most of the characters into meaninglessness, unable to capture their complexities. The wide arc she creates for Dorian doesn’t totally work, since Dorian is meant to be unchanging outwardly. Her performance gets laughs from the audience, but she does not inspire introspection or convey any of the deeper themes of the piece — instead opting for physical and vocal gymnastics, pausing for applause after each bit.
In a surprising move, changes and deletions in the text have made this “Dorian Gray” far less queer than its source material. An uninformed audience member might leave the play without even understanding that Basil, Henry, and Dorian are themselves all queer. All that remains is a single euphemistic speech of Basil’s listing some gossip and tragedies surrounding Dorian, lamenting, “Why is your friendship so fatal to young men?”
Crucially, when the novel was published it was seen as so explicitly queer that text from “The Picture of Dorian Gray” was used during Oscar Wilde’s trial as evidence of his homosexuality and supposed immorality and perversion. Just as Wilde’s novel was censored by its original editor, the play removes some of the most clearly queer passages, including when Basil admits to Dorian, “It is quite true I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man should ever give to a friend. Somehow I have never loved a woman.”
Likewise, Williams has made some questionable creative choices when it comes to the production’s non-textual representations of queerness. As Dorian goes on a depraved “odyssey of the senses,” Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” plays. The song, the first disco hit and an indelible gay anthem, here feels like a pandering cliche.
Later, Dorian visits an opium den, which Williams transforms into a modern-day nightclub, complete with techno, strobe lights, and a gay character smoking from a crystal meth pipe. While there is an argument to be made for the historical parallel, the fact that one of the only explicit representations of contemporary queerness is meth addiction does not speak well to the production’s sexual politics.
A key facet of the novel is its exploration of queer masculinity at the end of the nineteenth century, a period that saw the rise of dandy fashion and aestheticism. This complex nexus has been oversimplified here into the universalized concept of vanity. The production turns away from both queerness and masculinity, as evidenced in the casting of Snook.
Another illustrative moment occurs when, in the novel, Basil admits his love for Dorian and Dorian shows him the portrait, then murders him — a scene that can be read as a gay-panic homicide. Here Basil’s declaration of love has been cut and Dorian’s stabbing turns into comedy as he pouts in the mirror, and afterwards Snook does a lip-sync dance number (with camera operator backup dancers) to “Gorgeous” from The Apple Tree, complete with the lyric “There’s this avalanche of beauty in one woman and I’m it” and Dorian throwing confetti. It’s choices like these that highlight how far the production tonally diverges from the novel, and how little this production cares about queerness or masculinity.
A large portion of the show features pre-recorded snippets of Snook as various characters, and although the actress never leaves the stage, it’s hard not to feel a bit cheated. After all, we come to the theater for live performance. While there is a great deal of simulcasting, the use of technology is more rooted here in pre-recorded material, helping solve the logistical puzzle of having Snook play all the roles. This gets at a much bigger issue: This production fails to justify or explain why this is a one-person show or what is gained by this choice.
At its core, then, if the production doesn’t utilize its technology for commentary and is hampered rather than strengthened by its single-actor format, what’s left? The very premise of the production is a gimmick, a way to let an actor show off and dazzle the audience with some tricks. It’s an empty spectacle, though, and it remains unclear what – if anything – the production is trying to say other than that vanity is bad. Wilde himself wrote that we should not sort things into good and bad, but charming and tedious; this production falls squarely with the latter.
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