Wilde thing

2nd Story’s Gross Indecency

October 9, 2007 4:01:51 PM

2nd Story’s Gross Indecency

Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, by Moisés Kaufman, is a theatrical docudrama with all the excitement of a quick-cut Hollywood courtroom drama. The whirlwind production 2nd Story Theatre currently has up (through October 28) is an impressive revelation of why the play was such a Cinderella story in New York.

It doesn’t hurt that the Warren theater is staging it down the road in the historic Bristol courthouse, in an actual courtroom, reminding audiences that they are jurors as much as spectators.

Oscar Wilde is appreciated today in many ways. As an avatar of gay self-respect and pride. As an esthete who lifted the idealism of art above the mire of incapacitating realism. As a an exemplar and celebrator of wit, the bon mot, of articulate argument leavened by whimsy. And that’s before we get into praising him as a playwright, as well as pre-Tom Wolfe litterateur-as-fashion plate.

In 1895 Wilde was basking in the stage success of The Ideal Husband, which was followed only six weeks later by an even more popular The Importance of Being Earnest. His adulation came screeching to a halt and thrown into reverse when he reacted in outrage to a truthful accusation: the father of his aristocrat young lover left an open card at Wilde’s men’s club addressed to him as a “posing Somdomite” [sic].

Not only did Wilde object rather than wink, he brought a libel suit against John Douglas, the Marquess of Queensbury (yes, the codifier of boxing rules). This allowed Queensbury to establish the accuracy of his claim — about the “posing” — and thereby make public much evidence of Wilde’s homosexuality, actual criminal activity back then. That soon led to a trial of Wilde on gross indecency. A hung jury didn’t end the matter, and a month later Wilde was convicted in a retrial. Bankrupt, theater and publishing income ended, he spent the next two years at hard labor and died three years later in exile, abandoned by wife and children who changed their names, his health shattered, virtually penniless.

The unrushed but heart-pounding pace and clever embellishments by director Ed Shea keep us on the edges of our seats in this production. J.M. Richardson is a convincing Wilde, conveying both his withering — but buoyant — sarcasm and his profound vulnerability. F. William Oakes is a bulldog of a Queensbury, and Ara Boghigian comes across as a sincerely comforting Sir Alfred Douglas, “Bosie,” Wilde’s lover. As Wilde’s attorney, Joe Henderson reliably apprises us as well as his client about how worried he should be. Except for Richardson and Boghigian, the nine actors, all male, portray multiple characters.

The chameleon actors and the brisk tempo, aided by brief exchanges more frequent than lengthy recitals, combine to brilliant effect. Characters sometimes stride across a large central table or pipe up occasionally like wisecracking commentators. Kaufman draws from innumerable sources besides Wilde’s accounts: trial transcripts, journals, memoirs, books on the subject, even a modern-day analysis with the author quizzed by Kaufman (Dillon Medina). We always know where we are and who is speaking. The play comes across like a two-hour rumination on the subject, or a dream in which the sources come to life.

There are two main questions about Wilde to puzzle over, and their answers are probably quite similar. Why did he pursue the libel suit against legal advice, knowing the accusation was accurate? And why did he not flee to France after any of the trials, even though the authorities all but thrust passage tickets into his hands? The first question is only partially answered by Bosie angrily demanding that Wilde fight his father in court. Perhaps Wilde’s idealism and self-righteous indignation explain both. Wilde knew he was right, as did a thriving homosexual upper class, even if the Victorian Age he happened to be born into was hypocritical. As this play makes clear, Wilde wouldn’t have been able to live with himself if he had signed on to the hypocrisy.

Gross Indecency opened on a shoestring budget way Off-Off-Broadway in 1997, but word-of-mouth brought it to a larger theater in Manhattan, where a Times rave assured its longevity. Three years later, Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater Project finished research and collaboration on The Laramie Project, about the Wyoming murder of Matthew Shepard, an even more widely appreciated docudrama about another gay outsider and his more abruptly lethal demise. Kaufman has revitalized the staged docudrama with imagination and arrow-swift directness, and 2nd Story Theatre is demonstrating just how that looks.