Gross Indecency and Sweeney Todd

“Gross Indecency / Sweeney Todd” performance review, The Daily Cardinal, March 2000

“It’s not that Oscar Wilde is finally catching up with us,” says playwright Moises Kaufmann, “it’s that we’re finally catching up with him.”

Kaufmann’s play, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (running through April 2 at the Madison Repertory Theater, 122 State Street), makes this point painfully clear, weaving Wilde’s own words — collected from trial transcripts, his literary and dramatic works, letters and poems — around the inimical, often hypocritical mores of Victorian England. This provides the central tension of Kaufmann’s play: a systematic filtering and juxtaposing of Wilde’s rarified language and artistic precepts through and against the austere social climate of the period.

The “Trial of the Century,” as one newspaper reported it, was not one from our own century (the 20th, if one interprets the calendar correctly); but it very well could have been.

The law under which Wilde was prosecuted — Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which was signed into law by Queen Victoria in 1886, the year Wilde began having furtive homosexual trysts — was not repealed until the 1960s. Furthermore, the life that late he led is still cause for rigid disapproval in certain circles of our contemporary social and political culture.

But to confine the three trials, Kaufmann’s play, or even the substance of this review to a simple debate on sexuality and morality would not only be limiting but a serious miscarriage of interpretation. The more meaningful, if more complicated, legacy of these trials is the startling way in which art and morality were tried alongside the criminal proceedings.

It wasn’t only the rhetorical Wilde, with his clever evasions of the truth and his entrenched aesthetic creed, who steered the trials (especially the first) in this direction. It was also the counsel for the defense in the first trial (in which Wilde was plaintiff) and the prosecution in the second and third trials (in which Wilde was the accused), who insisted on connecting, however questionably, Wilde’s art and his private life.

Not surprisingly, the preface to Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (as well as a portion of the text) was seized upon by the defense in the first trial to advance the argument of Wilde’s moral “perversions.” “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book,” Wilde wrote in 1891, unwittingly abetting his legal opposition four years later.

A first-time playwright, Kaufmann was inspired by the Brechtian model of epic theater, which makes its appeal to reason more than emotion. But in the case of Gross Indecency, the two are meticulously entwined, one nearly indistinguishable from the other. The play, often dubbed a “docudrama,” employs an exceptionally adroit form of inter-cutting between courtroom scenes, flashback episodes and dramatizations of letters and published writings, which liberally adopt prose in the form of dialogue and monologue.

Kaufmann has also inserted interludes ancillary to the actual trial in order to illuminate relevant points of view (which presumably correspond to his own), such as those of Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s lover, and George Bernard Shaw, Wilde’s friend. He also abuts contradictory accounts, such as those of Wilde’s legal counsel, Sir Edward Clarke, and Douglas, which are not only amusing but irreverent.

Contradiction and irreverence are, in fact, the underpinnings of the play, both in text and stagecraft. There are several brilliant sequences in counterpoint, one framing Wilde in prison and Wilde in portrait, another pitting Wilde’s lush rhetoric against the stern denunciations of the main prosecutor in the second trial. The best illustration of irreverence is the fresh, anachronistic grafting of contemporary gay pride into London’s Old Bailey by exhibiting — in the most carnal sense of the word — four male prostitutes onstage, each clad in period underwear.

One thing Kaufmann cannot be accused of is ambivalence. Near the end of the play, a harsh chorus of voices delivers Wilde’s indictment. As it does, the play’s indictment of the gross indecency that characterizes the three trials reaches its own crescendo.

With its first-rate acting, efficient, expert direction by D. Scott Glasser, and distinctive scenic and sound design, Gross Indecency is the Rep’s first unqualified success of the current season, and a play not to be missed.

A play with a comparable setting but few other common features is Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Stephen Sondheim’s Tony® Award-winning musical (playing through this weekend at the Esquire Theater, 113 East Mifflin Street). The musical, set in 19th century England, is nearly operatic in design, with an almost unbroken flow of songs and underscoring, and a story with heavy strains of Greek tragedy and Grand Guignol.

Strollers Theater Ltd., with a large cast under the direction of David Lawver, has shaped a good production from a great play. There was something exciting, and ultimately gratifying, in watching a local company undertake a show that makes such heavy demands in its musical, dramatic and comedic mounting.

That it was done on this scale is perhaps the production’s greatest strength. Sondheim originally envisioned an intimate setting for his show, wanting only “fog and a few street lamps.” When it was booked at the Uris (now Gershwin) Theater, Broadway’s largest house, those plans were thwarted. “Someday it could be done small,” Sondheim rued at the time. With lofty revivals of the show being given briefly in London and New York this year, Sondheim might enjoy this production most.

As the title character, Jace Nichols (who bears a superficial resemblance to Lou Cariou, the actor who created the role on Broadway) carries the show with an appealing bravado and hulking presence. As the beggar woman, Marcy Weiland is also excellent. The lighting is superb and the music, apart from some occasionally unfortunate singing, is highly entertaining. As the opening — and closing number — “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” urges, “Attend the Tale of Sweeney Todd.”