The setting seemed perfect, a courtroom drama in the former courtroom of the historic Bristol Statehouse. The actor playing the judge would sit at the bench, there would be tables for the prosecution and defense, and a place for a jury made up of audience members. It was to be a realistic rendering of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, Moisés Kaufman’s award-winning play about Wilde’s fall from grace on charges of homosexuality.
But after a couple of weeks of rehearsals, director Ed Shea had a change of heart.
“It didn’t work for me,” said Shea. “It didn’t do a thing for me.”
Shea decided instead to go with a more generic space, with the actors moving about the room. The judge will speak from various places. Audience members will sit at the lawyers’ tables, which will be more like furnishings for a seminar than a trial. And the entire audience will serve as the jury, not just the people in the jury box.
This is the second time Shea and his 2nd Story Theatre have set up shop in Bristol’s 1816 Federal-style Statehouse on High Street, once home to the General Assembly and various courts. The company, which is based in neighboring Warren, opened last season there with Inherit the Wind, another courtroom drama based on the trial of John Scopes, arrested for teaching evolution in Tennessee in the 1920s.
That play seemed to benefit from realistic treatment. It was a play about heroes and villains, one in which sides were to be taken. But Gross Indecency, which opened Friday in previews, is different. Directing it like another episode of Law & Order would be too predictable, said Shea. Gross Indecency is a play about ideas, not laws, he said.
“It’s got to be this perfect balance of being a courtroom when you need it and not being a courtroom,” said Shea, “because we’ve seen all it before in B movies and soap operas, the berating prosecuting attorney, the patriarchal judge.
“This is not stock. It’s a bigger set of ideas than just guilt and innocence. What Kaufman was interested in was that art was on trial here, and that’s fascinating.”
BUT IT TOOK SOME TIME before Shea could understand that. He had seen Gross Indecency a couple of times in New York City, a production directed by Kaufman. The playwright went with a traditional set, with a gavel-wielding judge and actors picking up newspapers when they read accounts of the trial.
“It left an impression,” Shea said of the New York production. “I immediately moved in that direction, especially since the playwright directed it. You tend to say this is the way it should be done.
“But I had to really put on the brakes, and really reinvent and rethink the play.
“The courtroom is there, but the story is now being told without regard to space.”
Actually, Shea thinks of the room as more akin to a Quaker meeting house than a courtroom, a space where people from various perspectives can contribute to the story. Indeed, it is a play that should be seen from a number of vantages, said its author.
“In my naiveté I thought that when I was done with my research I would know who was telling the truth,” Kaufman said the other day by phone from his home in Manhattan. “But, of course, when I was done all I was left with was a number of different versions of the story.
“For me the play is not about the reconstruction of history, but about how impossible it is to reconstruct history. It’s a play about pointing to all these sources and having the audience make a decision as to whom they believe.”
KAUFMAN TOOK TWO YEARS to research and write Gross Indecency. He relied on court transcripts, books about Wilde and newspaper accounts of the trials, which began in 1895 and scandalized Victorian London. He even interviewed a Wilde scholar from New York University, who appears in the play and reinforces the notion that Wilde is being tried more for his subversive beliefs about art than for his sexual practices.
In the first of his three trials, Wilde sued for libel the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The marquess was outraged by the relationship between his son and Wilde, the most famous playwright of the day, and vowed to bring him down. He left a note at Wilde’s club accusing him of being a “somdomite” [sic].
Wilde was warned the trial might go against him, that it might call attention to his homosexuality, which was punishable by imprisonment. But Lord Douglas, known as Bosie, pushed him to take action, and Wilde had a certain air of haughty disdain about the whole affair, as though he were above the law.
The marquess was not only acquitted, Wilde was arrested and put on trial for homosexuality. He could have fled to France but decided to stay and face the charges against him.
Young male prostitutes were called as witnesses and confessed to having sex with Wilde, who denied their accusations. But being a sharp and irreverent wit, Wilde couldn’t help but make fun of the defense lawyer’s questions in the first trial.
Did he kiss a particular young man, he is asked by lawyer Edward Carson. Of course not, says Wilde, he wasn’t cute enough.
At that point Wilde realized he had backed himself into a legal corner, and Carson hammered away at him.
“You sting me and insult me and try to unnerve me,” said Wilde, “and at times one says things flippantly when one ought to speak more seriously. I admit that.”
If there are words to sum up Wilde’s legal debacle, said Shea, it is the Biblical saying that “pride goeth before the fall.”
The second trial ended in a hung jury. But in the third, Wilde was found guilty of “gross indecency with male persons” and sentenced to two years at hard labor.
At the start of his legal difficulties, Wilde was a relatively wealthy man, with two plays on stage in London’s West End. Within a matter of months his work was considered unproducible. His home and possessions had been sold at auction. His wife and two young sons changed their last name.
Wilde never wrote another play and died three years later a broken man. He was 46.
Gross Indecency opened in New York 10 years ago and ran for two years at the Minetta Lane. It has become one of the most popular contemporary plays on the American stage in the past decade, along with Kaufman’s Laramie Project, which is about the murder of a young gay man, Matthew Shepherd. Members of Kaufman’s Tectonic Theatre went to the small town of Laramie, Wyo., to interview members of the community for that play.
Kaufman, who was born in Venezuela to a Holocaust survivor father, conceded the story of Wilde is a familiar one, but says there is something compelling about it.
“An artist in a court of law being asked to defend his work is something I found very interesting.”
LIFE IS HECTIC RIGHT NOW for the 43-year-old Kaufman, whose newest play, 33 Variations, just opened in Washington, D.C. It deals with a music publisher who becomes fascinated with why Beethoven spent four years of his life writing his monumental Diabelli Variations, a masterwork based on an inconsequential waltz.
He said he has been besieged with offers from producers and interviews with the media. It was 4:30 in the afternoon when Kaufman called for this interview, and he still hadn’t eaten lunch. Someone was knocking on his door and he had several incoming calls.
Gross Indecency was Kaufman’s first play. He was the writer, or more precisely the editor, but it was developed with his company of actors.
“I think the thing that made this play so different and why it ran in New York for two years and became such an often performed play is that it treats Wilde as a complete human being, as an artist, as a man, and as a homosexual.”
Kaufman said it is impossible to separate Wilde the artist from Wilde the sexual creature.
“It’s like when people ask me if I’m a gay playwright. Yes, I’m a gay playwright, but I’m also a Jewish playwright, a Latino playwright, an Upper West Side playwright. I’m a writer of everything I am as a human being if I’m any good at it.”
Even though Gross Indecency is about an incident that took place more than a century ago, Kaufman still finds it relevant to contemporary audiences.
“It amazes me that we are still having conversations about gay marriage. My God, how far behind can we be? How many more idiots are going to have to speak their mind on this before we can move on?
“I would like to tell you that some of the problems Wilde was having we have overcome. But unfortunately that is not the case. There is a way in which I wish the play wasn’t as relevant as it is, but it is.”
Shea concurs, saying Gross Indecency is a play that’s going to appeal to people who know a lot about Wilde, something about Wilde and nothing about Wilde. Those who are unfamiliar with the trials will be given enough information to get involved in the story, said Shea.
“It’s a very smart play,” said Shea. “It’s a play that is going to really make people think and require some work to piece together. It’s going to speak to a lot of people for different reasons.”
IT IS THIS WIDE-RANGING APPEAL that attracted Shea to Kaufman’s script. Yes, the play is about a trial, about a jury finding Wilde guilty. But there also is a trial going on in which the audience will have to come up with its own opinion.
“We tell you what a jury said in a certain year,” he said, “but you are going to leave with your own opinion.”
The other thing that intrigued Shea is Wilde’s spiritual journey from “cynical hedonist” to a man writing about God in the poem that ends the play, The House of Judgment.
“He had doubts about the existence of Heaven, but we now know that even Mother Theresa had moments of doubt, and that didn’t make her anti-spiritual.”
Once again Warren’s 2nd Story Theatre has taken its show on the road to the historic Bristol Statehouse where it is staging Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde in an old courtroom. This is Moises Kaufman’s play about the fall from grace of one of England’s most revered playwrights. And while it is not great theater, it is livelier than you might think for a show with no sets and actors who spend the night sitting around a table. It’s more like a reading than a finished drama.
This is the second time 2nd Story has set up shop in the Bristol Statehouse. Last year, it put on Inherit the Wind there, another courtroom drama. But that was done fairly realistically, with a gavel-wielding judge and the audience serving as members of the jury.
This time around director Ed Shea has presented Gross Indecency as more a play of ideas, one that touches upon beauty, art, class and social mores. The all-male cast, clad in Victorian garb, sits around a large table in the center of the space. When it comes time for actors to speak their lines, they stand. But that’s about all the action there is. There are no changes of scene, just conversation strung together from courtroom testimony, biographies and newspaper accounts.
In fact, the entire play is assembled from found materials. All Kaufman (he also wrote The Laramie Project, which is about the murder of a young gay man) had to do was edit them. But he has done a skillful job of that, keeping the dialogue taut.
Still, there is a certain repetitiveness as we watch Wilde’s undoing played out over three trials. There is sense of sameness to the testimony and the witnesses.
Wilde’s legal woes began in 1895, when he was at the height of his career. Two of his plays were on stage in the West End of London at the time and he was among the most popular writers in England. That’s when he sued the father of his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, for libel. The Marquis of Queensberry could not abide his son’s relationship with Wilde and he wrote a note to the playwright accusing him of sodomy.
Wilde was warned that the trial might go against him, that he might be charged with homosexuality, a crime punishable by two years in prison. The marquis had hired detectives to round up young boys Wilde had been seen with and the testimony was damaging. In the end, the marquis was acquitted and Wilde ended up being arrested.
Wilde was encouraged to flee the country, but decided to stay and face the charges against him. He was tried, but the jury could not reach a verdict. The government insisted on trying him again.
In some ways Wilde, played by 2nd Story veteran John Michael Richardson, was his own worst enemy during the course of the trials. He was glib and cocky, until he began to dig himself into a legal hole. At one point, prosecutor Edward Carson asked Wilde if he kissed a certain boy and Wilde said no, the lad wasn’t cute enough.
Is that the only reason you didn’t, asked Carson.
At that point you see a flustered Wilde’s face drop. It is a moment from which he never quite recovers.
Richardson, it must be said, is terrific in the role, perhaps the only truly meaty one in the play. Most of the cast play a variety of bit parts, people responsible for uttering newspaper headlines or quotes from the likes of George Bernard Shaw.
But Richardson’s Wilde is someone of full dimension, funny at times, self-reflective at others. He can be a wag, an unabashed hedonist. But in the end, broken and humbled, he is a man searching for meaning, a man embracing the spiritual.
In all, the cast was consistently fine, with standoutout performances from an edgy and intense F. William Oakes as the vindictive marquis of Queensberry and the prosecutors, and from Ara Boghigian, an ardent Alfred Douglas, who after Wilde’s death married and became a Nazi sympathizer, we are told.
In a curious and brilliant touch, Kaufman includes among his assortment of period material a contemporary interview between himself and a Wilde scholar from New York University, Marvin Taylor. It is Taylor, played by Ryan Maxwell, who says the trials are not so much about Wilde’s homosexuality as they are about his subversive beliefs, about morality and Victorian society.
Wilde is asked as much about his writings, his art, as he is about the young men he associated with. And that is one of the things that makes this play more than just another whodunnit.
It makes it a brainy, sometimes hard to grasp piece of writing that deals not so much with criminal justice but with the enduring truth of art. And in that sense it is a play that requires a bit of thought and patience.
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.
Art is a vain beauty; and in its human manifestation of an artist such as Oscar Wilde, art, as often as not, poses a threat to moral authority. Such is the case in 2nd Story Theatre’s opening-season production of Moisés Kaufman’s, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde.
For the second year in a row, Artistic Director Ed Shea has set a courtroom drama in the historic courtroom of the Bristol Statehouse and once again the old courtroom walls are ringing with artistry and eloquence. JM Richardson’s portrayal of the besieged Wilde is riveting. I honestly don’t think Wilde himself could have played the part with any more humor or pathos. Wilde simply could not understand why he was so misunderstood, but Richardson’s performance, under Shea’s expert tutelage, made it painfully clear. As Don McLean wrote in his lovely ballad for Vincent Van Gogh, “this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.” These sentiments could just as easily be applied to wayward, by Victorian standards, Wilde.
The play is a tantalizing and terrifying look at just how paranoid the church and state become when confronted with ideas that threaten their hold over their parishioners and constituents. It is in effect, a good old-fashioned low-tech lynching of an honorable, if not, innocent man. To borrow a phrase from Woody Allen’s brilliant “Bullets Over Broadway”: “Artists create their own moral universe.” That’s what Wilde did in straight-laced Victorian England and it cost him everything - reputation, family, self-esteem, livelihood, and, arguably, his life.
A good courtroom drama by its very nature is spellbinding, but the Kaufman play is much more. Material is taken not only from court transcripts, but from letters, novels, poetry and the autobiography of Wilde’s companion, Lord Alfred Douglas. Ara Boghigian plays the role of Douglas with a beautiful blend of passion and compassion; he has as much contempt for his father, Marquess de Queensbury (F. William Oakes), as he has love for Wilde. Oakes and the remaining six members of the all male cast (Tom Bentley, Joe Henderson, Ryan Maxwell, Dillon Medina, Patrick Poole and Michael Zola) play multiple roles to perfection as the drama unfolds through the reconstruction of three trials and the events leading up to and surrounding them.
With information coming at you from all sides and in large doses, you could rapidly lose track of who said what to whom and when and what did it matter. But under Shea’s keen eye and ear, chaos is turned into something not only comprehensible, but something that is entertaining as well. Kaufman knows when to use the Wilde wit to keep the drama dramatic and the audience engaged. Following Wilde’s conviction for gross indecency, the English euphemism for sodomy, Shea has his actors chime in one at a time until they are speaking as one, like a Greek chorus or in this case an Anglican choir, singing the public verdict to a distraught Wilde. This is powerful stuff, the stuff of which great theater is made, and Shea has captured the play’s essence with his staging of this one dramatic scene.
If you like exhilarating drama and compelling theater, this is the show for you. But wear your thinking cap.
Great writing makes you think, while great theater keeps you thinking long after you’ve left the performance venue, sometimes for hours, days or even weeks. 2nd Story Theatre’s season-opening production of Moisés Kaufman’s Gross Indecency: The Three Trials Of Oscar Wilde is the greatest kind of theater, complete with provocative subject matter, stellar delivery and remarkable performances that stay with you long after you’ve left your seat.
In 1895 at the height of his career, renowned playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde brought a sensational libel suit against the father of his companion and lover, Alfred Douglas, who had publicly accused him of homosexual behavior, known then as gross indecency. The tables quickly turn against Oscar, as the evidence mounts of his seemingly inappropriate relationships with younger men came to light. In spite of the likely grim outcome, Oscar refuses to relent or admit any wrongdoing, continuously defending his life, art and passion. Even when given the opportunity to travel abroad and escape his inevitable fate, Wilde instead decides to accept his punishment, and is sent to prison for two years of hard labor, the consequences of which indirectly lead to his death in 1900.
Kaufman’s non-traditional play borrows from newspapers, letters, documents and trial transcripts, all of which lend themselves perfectly to the Bristol Courthouse stage setting and the rapid-fire dialogue. The end result is not a courtroom drama, but rather an engrossing presentation of facts and a narrative replay of key events that better illustrate the protagonist’s predicament, as well as his mindset throughout. As the perfect blend of history lesson, biographical character sketch, period piece and philosophical lecture, Gross Indecency makes for immeasurably compelling theater.
Actor J.M. Richardson’s surreal portrayal of Oscar is undeniably brilliant. Wilde wears many guises during the two-hour production, including flamboyant artist, arrogant expert, passionate scholar and desperate offender, and Richardson nails each emotion and identity with perfection. In a refreshing twist, Ara Boghigian plays Alfred (or “Bosie” as he preferred to be called) as a dignified - albeit inexperienced - young man, rather than a reckless dolt, like recent film interpretations have portrayed him. The actor has the perfect combination of boyish good looks and manly stature that would have easily and undoubtedly attracted the attention of Oscar. The seven other supporting players are all perfectly in sync, whether playing prosecutor, defender, or one of objects of Oscar’s affection. Considering there are no set or costume changes, and the magnitude of the intricate dialogue, each of these men shines in his own light.
Director Ed Shea is to be commended and congratulated for providing his audience with the opportunity to experience this important, unconventional work that profiles a controversial individual and explores a potentially divisive topic. “It’s finding the balance between education and entertainment,” said Shea, when discussing the show. Gross Indecency does just that, and it does it sensationally.
If Oscar Wilde had a guiding principle it could well have been the sometimes provocative idea of “art for art’s sake.” Wilde was a poet first, an ardent believer in the freedom to do one’s own thing, a word usage you can be sure he would scorn.
He ridiculed mere craft, laughed at commerce, and took his own stature as an artist very seriously. It was that aspect that raised him high and finally caused his titanic fall. All of this is clearly and resoundingly put forth in 2nd Story’s fast-paced and heartfelt production of “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde.”
The play is the work of Moises Kaufman, best-known for “The Laramie Project,” the story of the murder of Mathew Shepard in Wyoming. Kaufman has gone back to the transcripts of Wilde’s trial for sodomy in 1895 London. He has combed letters, newspaper articles, plays, novels, biographies and many other sources and still managed a physically simple but ever-hard-driving play. This story of Wilde’s reduction from Great Man of Letters to defeated human being goes on to the larger theme of the fight between art and morality.
We see Wilde’s conflict with the asinine marquis of Queensberry. We watch as the poet’s reputation falls away. We see the hard-driving lawyers who cared not a pittance for the beauty and blandishments of art. We hear the testimony of all the young men whom Wilde paid for sex. We note the hypocrisy of an age in which vile things were carried out, but never spoken of in public. “I don’t care what they do, so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses,” was one famous bon mot of the day.
The lawyers wear dark oh-so-respectable Victorian outfits Wilde is in a burnished orange waistcoat, with an off-white suit and fiery red carnation.
2nd Story’s artistic director Ed Shea has moved this production from the company’s home in Warren to the historic court house in Bristol. It’s a wise decision. The nine actors are seated before the judge’s bench. They watch carefully until it is their turn and then they pounce. They may jump sometimes onto a table or chair to deliver their lines, and the playwright’s lessons.
Shea’s lickety-split production perhaps gives more credence to the story of the man, rather than to the clash of art and so-called morality. But it still works and the director may have chosen his approach because he has such an accomplished actor to play Wilde.
J. M. Richardson is a lispy and breathy Wilde. His face is never still. His eyes express just what his voice is saying. He overacts, and makes you love it.
In the end, “Gross Indecency” is both a story of a man wronged and an argument that still goes on. It is also a very fine work of art. You have to think that Oscar Wilde would love it for that alone.