Trying Wilde

Exhibit A in the three trials of Oscar Wilde.

The contrasts over at the Boston Center for the Arts these days couldn't be more intense. You can choose - as Boston's mainstream critics have all insisted you should - to be body-slammed in the Roberts Studio Theatre by the rock 'em-sock'em identity-politics of The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity.

Or, you can tiptoe into the Wimberley next door, and slowly be drawn into what could be the subtlest and most absorbing production of the year.

I'm talking about Bad Habit Productions' Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, which runs through August 26th behind the curtains (appropriately enough) of the Wimberley, right up on its stage, in a startlingly mature production from new director Liz Fenstermaker, who has generally drawn remarkable performances from a cast of some of the best actors on the fringe.

Now I know we need all kinds of theatre.  And Chad Deity and Gross Indecency do have some similarities (they're both about stereotypes - and closeted gay men, for instance!).  But only Indecency is about actual people - indeed historical figures - even though Moisés Kaufman's transcription of the records and recollections surrounding the destruction (or self-destruction) of Oscar Wilde pulls off a startling trick: it's over-stuffed with period detail, yet it remains essentially a mystery.
Now in Chad, playwright Kristoffer Diaz never leaves the blackboard; his idea of a "drama" is to pin the audience on the mat and deliver a funny, hip lecture; he tells you exactly what you should think every single minute.  Kaufman's M.O. is entirely different; indeed, he hints at so many possible explanations for the courtroom drama that sent  the most glittering literary artist of the belle époque to hard labor (for "gross indecency") that we leave the theatre all but scratching our heads over the whole tragic episode.

What leaps out at you about Bad Habit's take on the text is how deeply director Fenstermaker appreciates this paradox.  She understands that just as Victorian society operated as a kind of social maze, in which all modes of pleasure were tolerated as long as they remained disguised, so the historical record of the trials of Oscar Wilde is itself a kind of screen, suggesting but never quite revealing the true nature and intents of its protagonists.

Although at some moments, I wondered if Fenstermaker hadn't kept things too subtle - a few darker bolts of passion (and despair) might have flickered between Wilde (John Geoffrion) and the gorgeous source of all his woe, Lord Alfred Douglas (known as "Bosie," at left), who egged his older lover on to sue his father, the Marquess of Queensberry (yes, that was his actual title) for libel.  You may have heard of the Marquess (below right) elsewhere - he was so hysterically butch that he actually sponsored the code of rules for boxing that remains in effect today (its great innovation was requiring the use of gloves in the ring).

Queensberry took off the gloves when it came to Wilde, however. Determined to end the playwright's hanky-panky with his son (whose elder brother had died a few years before, in a shooting accident that itself may have been a gay suicide), he left him an insulting card at his club (the offending doc, at top), labeling the self-consciously florid author "a posing Somdomite" (sic).

Homophobic and illiterate - you couldn't ask for more, could you, in a dowager queen of the gentleman's sport of boxing.  But the Marquess (unexpectedly) had his complexities, too - his relationship with his son was tortured, but not impossible to understand, and he was more aware of the ubiquity of homosexuality in his society than you might imagine; Queensberry even asked that mercy (of a sort) be extended to Wilde before the legal machine had had its full way with him.

The Marquis of Queensberry

And you could easily argue it was Wilde who sealed his own doom - once he had initiated libel charges against Queensberry, it was inevitable his many dalliances with rent boys (and blackmailers) would surface.  He was a "somdomite" - yet somehow convinced himself that a witty command performance of his famous artistic "beard" could obscure that fact, even before the testimony of his sexual partners. Or did he imagine Queensberry's defense would be so inept, or so embarrassed before the facts of the author's activities in the London demi-monde, that it, like Wilde himself, would be unable to describe the love that dared not speak its name?

Either way, Wilde was guilty of a tragic self-deception - because once the evidence of his behavior had been laid before the Crown, he was immediately in danger of prosecution for the crime of "gross indecency" (sexual congress between men - but not women - had been outlawed in Britain only about a decade before).

Wilde still had his sympathizers, however, and the legal system lumbered at a suspiciously slow pace throughout his prosecution (one trial even ended in a hung jury).  Meanwhile artsy aristocrats fled London like lemmings as the proceedings ground on (the trains to Dover, and the ferries to Calais, were packed).  But Wilde stayed put, even when told he had only hours left before the summons for his arrest arrived.

The question is - why did he stay?  Bosie himself, the love object sparking the whole debacle, soon took flight for the Continent (as it was inevitably asked why Wilde was standing in the dock, but not he).  This is the one question which moves like a spectre behind the veil of Kaufman's text: how could this grand, delightful performer of the gay persona cooperate in his own punishment? Did a buried vein of self-loathing drag him to his doom?  Some hidden core of Catholic guilt?

These questions I suppose will always echo through the legacy of the case (and indeed, discoveries of various letters after Kaufman completed his text have only complicated certain mysteries around Bosie). Wisely then, this production leaves such enigmas to haunt us till the final curtain. In the meantime, we get to savor a series of poised and articulate performances that most of our local Equity houses would be hard pressed to match. John Geoffrion may not much resemble Wilde, bu he captures beautifully the delightful, self-satisfied sparkle of the wit (as many noted in amazement, Wilde could carry off dazzling epigrams even under cross-examination).  He also nails the vulnerable moment when Wilde first stumbles (letting it slip that he would never have kissed a certain man, because "he was not beautiful") - it  lets you know immediately that without the perfection of his self-performance, Wilde would prove utterly at sea.

As Bosie (both at left), newcomer Kyle Cherry is almost as good; he looks just right, and when coiled on a Victorian settee, this young actor exudes a palpably spoiled and unstable charisma. Meanwhile, as his antagonist, the Marquess,  David Lutheran is always effective - but sometimes I felt there was a more sympathetic, or at least complicated, dimension to be found in his dastardly deeds. Elsewhere the work was always polished, and often absorbing:  Gabriel Graetz brought just the right amount of professional zeal to the prosecution, while Matthew Murphy communicated a touchingly confused sympathy as the defense.  Character turns by Brooks Reeves and Tom Lawrence were likewise mature and convincing, while Joey Heyworth and Luke Murtha made a believably practical pair of rentboys.  But actually the entire cast deserves mention, so kudos to Morgan Bernhard, James Bocock, and Derek McCormack as well (and I shouldn't forget their dialect coach,  Susanna Harris Noon).  Bad Habit has made a good habit of noteworthy productions of British drama (An Ideal Husband, Arcadia); Gross Indecency now ratifies that sterling run as a triple crown.

Into the woods with Tom Stoppard

Sir Tom Stoppard in thermodynamic repose.

I do love Arcadia; I've loved it ever since I read it, before I'd ever seen it.  To me, it's Tom Stoppard's best play - and certainly one of the classics of the twentieth century - even if it's not his most original, and even if I'm not really prepared to defend its achievement against such possible rivals as Travesties or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

The "trouble" with Arcadia, of course, is that it's so synthetic, and its organizing structure so brazenly borrowed from A.S. Byatt's Possession (almost as compensation, you sometimes think, the playwright offers a Stoppard-like antagonist to a Byatt-like scholar right in the middle of the script), while many of its debates, as Boston Lowbrow's Bryce Lambert points out, are stolen from James Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science.  But even if by borrowed means, Stoppard conjures in Arcadia an elaborate entertainment (indeed, an old-fashioned play of ideas) that perfectly balances his frisky wit with a mournful awareness of life's terrible vicissitudes - as well as breezy discussions of not only poetry, landscape architecture, and the Romantic period, but also chaos theory, fractal geometry, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics (with Fermat's Last Theorem thrown in as a kind of aperitif).

Stoppard's conceit is that even as we watch a set of academic sleuths in the present day dig about in a country manor for clues about Lord Byron (who once visited), we can simultaneously watch, through some sort of time warp, the historical record of that fateful weekend back in 1809.  Today's intellectuals rattle on about sex and the romantic imagination; little do they know their counterparts two centuries ago were consumed instead with thoughts of sex and science - largely because a mathematical prodigy was on the premises, in the person of young Thomasina Coverly (note the similarity of that first name to Stoppard's own, Tomáš - yes, his ego et in Arcadia). She was the real "genius" of the house, not Byron, although her achievements, like her short life, were lost; our true history is always a secret, Stoppard whispers (thus Thomasina's descendant in the present day won't speak at all) - even as he braids together C.P. Snow's two cultures of science and the humanities more intimately than perhaps any one else has ever managed; indeed, the playwright's final images are of the two ages (and cultures) dancing around each other in an entwined enchantment.

All this, of course, makes Arcadia quite a challenge - it requires a large, poised and articulate cast that can bring off serious debate and romantic feeling as well as high comedy (and a director who knows how to keep that delicate balance).  So it felt like a stretch for a fringe company - still, I had heard good things about the Bad Habit version (which closed, alas, last weekend - this is a post-mortem, but then that's kind of appropriate for Arcadia).  And I've often been surprised at what the fringe can do - indeed, every season a fringe show ranks in my top 10 for the year.

Greg Nussen and David Lutheran make their way through the thickets of Arcadia.

So I wasn't shocked to discover that this Arcadia was, indeed, a solid effort - wittily directed and mostly well-acted, with one or two stand-out performances.  To be honest, it was helped immensely, in my view, by being apparently acted by smart, quirky people who understood what it was about, rather than by a crowd of Equity actors attempting to simulate a professorial intelligence they didn't really have.  Alas, a few mis-castings, and one or two failures in acting energy (there was little sexual heat in this version) kept it, I think, from greatness.  Still, director Daniel Morris and his cast did well by Stoppard's ideas - and there are a lot of those in Arcadia; as should be the case with this particular play, you could feel the audience paying close attention to everything that transpired, eager to catch every multi-layered quip and witty aside (a sight not often seen at our larger stages, I'm telling you).  And I felt that the decision to produce the script on the stage of the Wimberley Theatre, in the round, proved inspired; I'd always thought of Arcadia as a proscenium show, but something about the arena staging, with its matrix of exits and entrances, resonated with the play's themes; the only thing lacking, alas (and you rarely get this anyway), was the backdrop of romantically ruined grounds that are meant to be seen outside the windows of "Sidley Park" - and which become freighted with more and more tragic meaning as the play progresses.

But this reminds me, I'm afraid, of the one great failure in Morris's otherwise astute direction - the play's final tragedy, which Stoppard never states directly (and which I can't give away without ruining the sad magic of its discovery) - didn't really coalesce in the audience's mind, I don't think, as the curtain fell (although perhaps it did after later discussion). That gap, however, was connected intimately to the production's other great gap - in the pivotal role of Thomasina's besotted tutor, Septimus Hodge, young Greg Nussen proved woefully inadequate.  Mr. Nussen is very nice to look at - and his voice is a pleasing purr; but his blandness was a constant reminder that, as they say, beauty isn't everything.  And his performance was a particular problem because Septimus Hodge is supposed to have the passionately beating, ultimately broken heart at the center of the script!

Luckily, everyone else seemed to know what they were doing - even when they weren't quite right for their respective roles - so generally the play moved forward without him. John Geoffrion, for instance (a frequent commenter on this blog, btw), brought a welcome spark to Bernard Nightingale, the egotistical, Stoppard-like Byron expert who stomps all over the work of the Byatt-like Hannah Jarvis.  Geoffrion was one of those slight miscastings in the show that worked pretty well anyway - he played Nightingale as more of a twit than a dick, and so the sexual tension between him and Jarvis went missing - but he threw himself with such eager fire into his rants on art and science that you didn't really mind.  Meanwhile, as Jarvis, Sarah Bedard didn't seem to mind the lack of tension either; Bedard is a beauty, and projected the right kind of skeptical intelligence as Jarvis, but she was always too calm for me to really believe in her slow burn - nor did I quite see her put together the script's great mystery in her head (Nightingale's thesis on Byron is an ego-driven fantasy, but Jarvis steadily works her way toward something like the truth).

Still, Bedard managed many a witty turn of phrase, and there were similarly nice turns from many in the cast.  As the smartly sluttish Lady Croom, for instance, A. Nora Long didn't convince me as a sexual raptor, but her drily rendered sarcasm was always delightful; meanwhile, Nick Chris was utterly believable as Stoppard's brilliant exponent of chaos, but didn't always have the sensitive vulnerability that surfaces now and then in the part (and which afflicts his entire eccentric family).  There were more consistently satisfying comic turns from David Lutheran, as an idiotically pompous cuckold, and especially Glen Moore, as his blowhard companion.  Meanwhile Luke Murtha was always sweetly intriguing as that silent brother.  But at the center of the production was a really spectacular turn by newcomer Alycia Sacco as the sparkling Thomasina - easily the best performance of this role I've seen out of four professional productions.  Whenever Sacco giggled, or waltzed to Chopin, or uncertainly offered a brilliant solution to an unsolved theorem, the show all but belonged to her, and you felt art and science dancing together (for a brief moment) just as Stoppard meant them to.

Christopher Durang Parodies It All for You

Heather Peterson and Mack Carroll in Nina in the Morning.

Bad Habit Productions keeps kind of just missing its big break. It's one of the stalwarts of the fringe (the Cambridge fringe, which centers on the YMCA in Central Square) and regularly delivers smart, snappy productions - just not consistently enough to hang onto the public's attention span.  And when it does have a breakout production, usually with a zippy farce like last year's Ideal Husband, its big idea tends to get "borrowed" by other theatres.  Add to that the fact that press coverage is drying up in this town for everything but full-equity shows, and it's no wonder the company's latest, Durang Durang (which I think closes tomorrow) has garnered little or no press attention.

Which is too bad, because it features several strong performances from folks who toil on the cusp between Boston's community and semi-pro scenes, and who are looking for their "big break," too.  The evening itself - a collection of parodies and one-acts by dark, ditzy farceur Christopher Durang - is a bit hiss-or-miss (the parodies are generally stronger than the farces, but everything has a tendency to go on a bit too long), but at its best it's wicked funny, just as it should be, particularly to theatre types who can appreciate the playwright's precise puncturings of the likes of Tennessee Williams and Sam Shepard.

As a playwright, Durang is a curious case - his influence has actually been huge, even though he has probably never written a great play, and only one or two really good ones (Beyond Therapy, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You).  His central emotional trope - commingled horror of/attraction to the cruel pleasures of nihilistic freedom - has certainly proved durable. But the trouble with Durang is that he suffers from a kind of dramatic attention deficit disorder - he can't sustain a story or even a scene for very long; addicted to the "freedom" that terrifies him, he has to constantly dodge in and out of various meta-theatrical modes that are, admittedly, funny, but also destroy any larger ambition he might have for his work.  Still, his attendant, vaguely-collegiate attitude - that of a smart-aleck, all-knowing auditor of what's happening on stage - has pervaded pop culture; watch any Simpsons episode, and you're bound to feel his influence, and Ryan Landry's whole schtick is merely a variant of his M.O.

And if you're interested in his history, Durang Durang operates as a solid introduction to the playwright, for good and ill, as it showcases both his strengths and weaknesses in about equal measure.   The most famous of the parodies (some of which I vaguely remember seeing years ago at the ART) is the gender-bent Glass Menagerie send-up For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls, but the best is probably A Stye of the Eye, which isn't so much a parody as a satire - actually, a brutal putdown - of the intellectual pretensions of Sam Shepard (particularly his dopey A Lie of the Mind).  Here Shelley Brown, Jenny Gutbezahl, Julie Jarvis, and Mike Budwey all had a field day, and the trenchant one-liners came thick and fast; I think my favorite moment came when wizened old "Ma" opined that her two warring sons "Seem like opposite sides of the same personality . . . ta think I gave birth ta two symbols, and me without a college education!!"  Yup, that's Sam Shepard in a nutshell.

The trouble is that when Durang, the brilliant parodist, tries to spread his own dramatic wings, he can't get off the ground - or he falls victim to the same superficial tendencies he so expertly lampoons in others.  Nina in the Morning, for instance, resembles what a Sam Shepard one-act would look like if Shepard had been born gay in Beverly Hills.  And Wanda's Visit is really just an extended sitcom episode.  Meanwhile Business Lunch at the Russian Tea Room features some viciously accurate satire of the Hollywood scene, but centers around a playwright who can't write a real play (and who ends up folding laundry onstage).

So what happened to Christopher Durang?  How did he start at the Yale Rep, connected to everybody and everyone, with a smart sensibility to boot - yet end up folding laundry and writing TV pilots?  I don't know, and Durang Durang doesn't tell us.  But as we ponder the playwright's disappointing career, at least we can enjoy his waspish critical wit, as well as a few more sharp performances at Bad Habit: Heather Peterson knocked both Nina and Tea Room out of the park, and there were more nice turns from Julie Jarvis, Sheryl Johns, Mack Carroll, and Joseph O'Connor.  With performances like these, it's only a matter of time before Bad Habit finds a larger place in the city's theatrical scene.

The Marquis de Sade's Bad Habit

It's in the nature of things that a young theatre's reach should sometimes exceed its grasp. In fact, that's the way things should be. But I'm afraid Quills, Doug Wright's dark fantasia on the - uh - "irrepressible" Marquis de Sade, proves more than a stretch for the up-and-coming Bad Habit Productions, one of the "Cambridge Fringe" companies working out of the YMCA in Central Square.

The production does boast a charismatic lead performance from Timothy Otte as the gleefully perverted Marquis. But Quills requires much more than a single star turn - ghoulish as it is, it's essentially a black farce in slow motion that demands a high sense of style in both performance and design. And while there are glimmers of talent here and there in the generally fresh-faced cast, there's very little of what you might call mature control (one actor attempts a French accent, for example, while everyone else sounds American - except for one other newcomer, who goes slightly British now and then). Meanwhile the set is half-baked, and the costumes kind of inexplicable (they seem to float between multiple periods). The whole thing feels like a well-intentioned college production - appropriate to friends and family only, I'd say; but to any one else, it might seem positively sadistic.

In case you're unfamiliar with the play, it's a history piece that plays so fast and loose with history that it's essentially fantasy. It's well known that the Marquis spent his last years in the asylum of Charenton; Wright's conceit is that the hospital's administration set about trying to silence de Sade through any means possible - including eventual dismemberment. Of course nothing like this happened to the Marquis at all; perhaps the most horrifying thing about his whole career is that he died peacefully in his bed - and what's more, Wright's tormented torturer, the Abbe de Coulmier (Eric Hamel) was, in real life, one of de Sade's protectors, not punishers.

Oh, well, what are a few historical facts, I suppose, when you're bent on simplistic propaganda, as Wright is here. Having suffered through both Justine and Philosophy of the Bedroom in college, I have few illusions about the Marquis as an avatar of freedom; his sexual peccadilloes all depended on coercion or actual incarceration, and while modern types like to think of him as advocating something like today's voluntary S&M scene, he was actually more into sewing up vaginas that had been infected with syphilis and ejaculating over freshly murdered corpses. He wasn't so much an existentialist as an obsessive sociopath, and hardly a libertine but rather a slave to his own compulsions.

Wright's point, however, is that those who would control (or eradicate) the Marquis's savage impulses will inevitably become as monstrous as he. Fair enough; but does it really require over two and a half hours of stage time to make this rather obvious case? Apparently; but we tire of his slow, steady march toward the inevitable well before Quills reaches its climax (which does, I must admit, include a memorably creepy coup de théâtre). And it doesn't help that most of the cast has trouble declaiming the playwright's labored attempt at period speech.

There is, it's true, Otte's performance to enjoy; his high spirits buoy much of the play, and he seems utterly unfazed by his lengthy stretches of nude repartee. Even he, however, doesn't quite suggest the relentlessness of de Sade's obsessions - which might have helped Eric Hamel, who's thoughtful, but not much more, in the difficult role of the Abbe (a part I confess I've never seen come off). As the Marquis's "love" interest, Jenny Reagan also shows some potential, but I think should have a bit more avid energy. The rest of the cast struggles, in various modes and keys. Bad Habit had a recent success in their witty "drag" version of Wilde's An Ideal Husband (a production which will soon be reproduced up at Gloucester Stage); which may have led them to believe they were up for any kind of exercise in high style. But alas, where Wilde glitters, Wright lumbers, and as a result, this production of Quills sometimes feels like a kind of children's crusade.

Wilde thing

The new production of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband playing at the YMCA Central Square (it closes this weekend) is, I suppose, far from ideal - but you'll still be tickled pink by it. Only four actors (at left) perform all the parts in this sparkling comic melodrama, which leads to much crossing of dress and gender, and predictably broad, Hasty-Pudding-level gags. Which, I have to admit, hardly serves half the script, in which Wilde cross-pollinated his usual glittering wit with a surprisingly sophisticated and touching moral POV. In this production, however, you can forget all about subtext and subtlety, which is too bad - and causes the final sequences in the play to drag in the wrong way. But what you get is the wit - broadly played, it's true, but still a hoot; the show reminds you of those funny college shows in which all the class cut-ups would chew the scenery with self-confident charm.

Of course half the time, the kids are not alright, because they're throwing on gray wigs and pretending to be fifty (and you don't believe them for a minute). What's worse, whenever Wilde turns world-weary, somebody inevitably tromps on in drag to shred the gossamer atmosphere that makes this play so haunting and unique. You just have to wait through these parts. Don't worry, the script will soon re-focus on Wilde's dazzling powers of paradoxical conversation, and the show will soon get funny again - quite funny. And to be honest, even half a great production of An Ideal Husband is better than most theatre companies could manage.

The cast is uniformly clever and energetic, but Sasha Castroverde probably takes top honors for a combination of hilariously broad drag roles as well as the one "serious" performance (as the rigidly moral Lady Chiltern) that manages to touch us. Adam Kassim, as Wilde's putatively hetero factotum Lord Goring, is perhaps even wittier than Castroverde - and the priceless way he kills time during somebody's costume change with a chess match against himself has to be seen to be believed; but his sparkling, blithely self-aware youth isn't quite right for his sadder, more-experienced character. Likewise Anna Waldron carries off her ingénue role with surprising charm - and even convinces you that she and Goring could make a go of it - but is simply too young and transparent to convince as the scheming Mrs. Cheveley (perhaps Wilde's most intriguing villain). As her flawed, but basically decent victim, Tom Giordano is sympathetic, but again lacks the gravitas the part requires - and alas, he doesn't get enough stage time in a frock to impress us with his skills at farce (although what he does do is certainly worth a giggle). Costume designer Wendy Misuinas deserves praise for devising some pretty-convincing Victoriana that can be thrown on and off at will, and director Daniel Morris demonstrates he knows his way around an epigram. And sometimes with Wilde, that's enough.