Sarah Snook portrays some 25 characters as well as the narrator in this dazzling and sometimes dizzying stage-and-video adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel, but at the curtain call, she is far from alone: Fourteen other people, all dressed in black, take their bows with her. These are the
5 Camera Operators
1 Dresser
1 Wig Supervisor
2 Prop Managers
3 Carpenters
and 2 LX/Sound Engineers
who make Snook’s performance possible. They, and especially video designer David Bergman,.also help turn writer and director Kip Williams’s adaptation of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” into a visually clever, technically sophisticated production for which “solo play” feels like an inadequate description.
Unlike other recent productions in New York of a classic story performed by a single actor — Andrew Scott in “Vanya,” currently Off-Broadway at the Lortel Theater, or Eddie Izzard in “Hamlet” last year at the Orpheum – the characters Snook portrays are frequently pre-recorded video projections or pre-set voiceovers. This allows for multiple characters to gather together at the same time: At a dinner party scene, there are some half dozen aristocrats exchanging gossip and epigrams, each distinctly coiffed, clothed and caricaturized; all Snook – one of whom is (I think) the real-time one. The integration can be so effective that it’s occasionally difficult to tell whether one of the characters is a recorded projection or not (but unlike many other solo shows with multiple characters, it’s almost always clear which character is talking when.) Even the various-sized screens on which the images are projected feel beautifully choreographed.
If such visual pleasure is superficial, that doesn’t detract from Oscar Wilde’s words; it’s largely in service to them. After all, Dorian Gray is the 19th century avatar of the superficial — a handsome young man who stays that way at the cost of his soul, while it’s a portrait painting of him that becomes old and ugly and cruel.
The serial publication of Wilde’s story in 1890 is said to have scandalized Victorian England, and was even used as evidence against him five years later when he was imprisoned for “gross indecency,” British legal lingo at the time for homosexuality. It is indeed easy now to see the story as an allegory of gay life: A beautiful 20-year-old boy is taken under the wing by two older men, first painter Basil Hallward who does his portrait and then epigramist Lord Henry Wotton, who upon meeting him for the first time observes: “He was certainly wonderfully handsome, his finely curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair. No wonder Basil Hallward worshipped him. He was made to be worshipped.”
It’s therefore playful, and perhaps provocative, to cast a woman to portray Dorian – and Basil and Lord Henry, and everybody else. Snook, an Australian actress best-known to American audiences for her role as Siobhan “Shiv” Roy in “Succession,” first appears as Dorian in an Elvis-era duckboy blond wig and, given the flamboyantly sensual description we just heard, there’s a whiff of parody in the impersonation.
But her characterizations turn darker when, under Lord Henry’s perverse influence, Dorian pursues a life of hedonism that quickly turns cruel. He rejects Sybil Vane, an actress who has fallen in love with him, because one night she gives a bad performance. Lord Henry explains that he wasn’t really in love with her; he was in love with the idea of her; with the characters she played. Again, one can easily apply a gay interpretation here.
Kip Williams chooses to connect the vanity and corruption in the story more broadly to modern life. At one point, we see Lord Henry and the Duchess of Monmouth receive Botox injections. When Dorian disappears in the dark of night into an opium den, it is indistinguishable from a very loud disco, even playing Donna Summer’s “ I Feel Love.” The most in-your-face staging (literally) is the use of snap-chat filters to depict characters monstrously distorted by either beauty makeovers or a life of decadence. There are also unmistakable allusions to selfies and Instagram. The images are not all that strike home; the narrator at one point says: “London grew drunk on his excess. It was indeed a new age. Life became a dazzling plethora of ‘more’, a glittering cornucopia of ‘next’, a shimmering superfluity of ‘yes, yes, yes, now, now, now, me, me, me’ “
“The Picture of Dorian Gray” runs two hours without an intermission, and I’ll confess that near the end its increasingly frantic pace and horror movie vibe began to tire me out – making me even more impressed with Sarah Snook’s endurance. I also noticed that I became so used to watching the action on the screens that I resisted when they clearly want us to redirect our attention to the stage.
I thought of Wilde’s preface to the 1891 edition of the novel. “The artist can express everything,” he wrote. “Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.” What would he have thought of videos?
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Music Box Theater through June 15, 2025
Running time: Two hours, no intermission
Tickets: $135 – $521
Written and directed by Kip Williams, adapted from the novel by Oscar Wilde
Set and Costume Design is by Marg Horwell, Lighting Design by Nick Schlieper, Composition & Sound Design by Clemence Williams, Video Design by David Bergman, dramaturg and creative consultant Eryn Jean Norvill .
Cast: Sarah Snook
Photos by Marc Brenner
