Who doesn’t relish a Wildean paradox? So concise while speaking volumes, amoral yet morally improving. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde strews his queered maxims with gusto: “punctuality is the thief of time,” “the tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but one is young,” or that all-time banger, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” Here’s my meagre addition vis à vis the adaptation of Dorian Gray now at the Music Box: “Sarah Snook acts with the total humility that only a solo performer can.”
As with Oscar’s cheeky epigrams, I’m in earnest. Snook plays 26 characters from the 1891 novel, plunging into and out of a dense forest of wigs, whiskers, moustaches, pants, waistcoats, dresses, smoking jackets and sundry other accessories to populate the stage with a panoply of English comic types. Her transformations across gender, age, and class are chameleonic displays of protean stamina that you could, in a sense, call self-abnegating. Snook isn’t coasting on cold-blooded manipulator Shiv Roy from HBO’s Succession. This isn’t a star turn so much as a supernova explosion, virtuosity employed not for self-love but love of storytelling.
And while Snook’s giving a master class in technique (simpering fops, drawling aristos, tittering ingénues), she couldn’t do it without a small army of camera operators and dressers orbiting her planet like dutiful moons. This Dorian Gray, the script of which writer-director Kip Williams carved faithfully from the original text, is a meticulous hybrid of live capture, pre-recorded video and voiceover. Five large LED screens cross the stage, rising and dropping, bearing hi-def jumbo images of Snook captured by a camera-toting crew. She’s often hidden upstage behind these panels, but we see her getting into and out of costume pieces (she registers a mock “ow!” when the louche Lord Henry Wotton’s moustache is ripped off). When Lord Henry and the painter Basil Hallward appear together in a shot, Snook is seamlessly composited in the frame with her pre-recorded self. As a delightful extra touch, Williams adds the actor in her “neutral” Narrator mode, video-bombing the shot in the background. A multiplicity of Snooks serve this tale about a soul splintering as flesh stays frozen.
The plot, for those not previously corrupted by Wilde’s gothic shocker: Hallward creates a breathtaking portrait of a beautiful young dandy named Dorian Gray. Visiting Hallward and running into Dorian posing for his picture, principled hedonist Lord Henry becomes enraptured by the cherubic youth. Dorian is instantly converted by Lord Henry’s sensualist credo: “[E]very impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. Resist temptation, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.” Later Dorian falls in love with a charming actress, then realizes it was her talent, not she, he adored. He rejects her, and the devasted thespian commits suicide in her dressing room. That night, Dorian sees the sins of his cruel deed registered not on his perfect visage but on the portrait hanging in his attic. He realizes he can commit any sin, indulge any vice, grow older—without changing a jot. The painting will decay and deform as his body remains eternally young. Cue sex, drugs and raves.
Such material that fetishizes surfaces and focuses obsessively on the framed image (Dorian constantly compares the putrefying painting to his face in a handheld mirror) is hideously apt for our age of Instagram filters and social media. Never before has human life been so exhaustively curated and broadcast, to make us seem beautiful, witty, and popular. Since Snook’s eyeline often goes straight to the camera, as characters in close-up or when Dorian stares at his portrait, the identity of the screen itself grows slippery. When Snook looks at the portrait, she’s looking at the audience, as if through a portal. She and we are simultaneous stand-ins for the enchanted canvas: two black mirrors gazing narcissistically into each other’s fatal depths.
At this point, theater purists may throw up their hands and demand: Why pay inflated Broadway prices for what is essentially two hours of TV? To my mind, it’s sublime spectacle with impeccable dramaturgy, all spun around phenomenal acting. More, there’s an accomplished physical dimension to the piece, which is minutely choreographed (blink and you’ll miss little dance steps camera operators execute at one point while circling Dorian). There are several rolling scenic elements—including a toy puppet theater that Snook pops into from below, looking like a jolly decapitated diva. One’s eyeballs gobble up Marg Horwell’s luscious, flower-filled sets and costumes, which practically tickle your nostrils with floral aromas.
We spend so much time looking at Snook’s face in close-up, we start to wonder what physiognomic qualities allow these mutations. There’s the broad face and apple cheeks, the piercing hazel eyes, the muscular, mobile brow; she uses these elements as a conductor would violin, timpani, woodwinds. Snook’s vocal work is no less exemplary, reminding us that the basis of so much great theater is the power of the voice armed with poetic language.
In one bravura sequence, Dorian (now sporting a positively tumescent blonde pompadour), plays with a beautification filter on their smartphone. Click! Their lips are absurdly full and pouty, face skinny, and eyes dazzling. Then the filter comes off and there’s Snook, sweaty, splotchy, normal. Dorian flips between the modes with horrified delight, which we share. The extreme dehumanization of artificial perfection versus our inability to accept nature. Video designer David Bergman, coordinating with lighting designer Nick Schlieper, creates both seamless cinematic illusions (the compositing), and cheerfully silly ones—such as photoshopping Snook’s face into dozens of classic paintings—Moroni, Bronzino, Gainsbrough—that adorn virtual walls. You will not see a Broadway show with better taste in art direction this season.
At two hours without intermission, some fatigue may set in during the final 40 minutes, as Dorian murders Hallward, disposes of the body, goes on a hellish trip to an opium den, and then faces down the brother of the actress for whose death he’s responsible. Williams’s visual storytelling starts to lean more heavily on movie tropes (inventing a chase scene during a hunting party that is exciting, if superfluous). Still, if we grow weary waiting for Dorian’s downfall, Snook never flags. It’s like she hits runner’s high halfway through, dashing around the space tearing through costumes and voices with greater demonic speed. Among the ways to read Wilde’s novel—aesthetic manifesto, morality tale, queer fable—it’s also a tragedy of addiction. Snook mainlines insane doses of adrenaline, and the hormone floods us, her framed likeness in the dark, sympathetically. Is it any wonder at final bow she’s still glowing, and we’re wrecked?
The Picture of Dorian Gray | 2hrs. No intermission. | Music Box Theatre | 239 West 45th Street | 212-239-6200 | Buy Tickets Here
