An LED screen more than 16 feet tall. Four smaller ones drifting like clouds. Another that has a kind of walk-on cameo. Five camera operators with their electronic burdens. Nine people dashing every which way with wardrobe, wigs and whatnot. Three million pixels, in case you’re counting. Sixteen million colors. Two cellphones, at least on a recent glitchy night when the first malfunctioned. And one Sarah Snook.
Or rather a multitude of Snooks.
These are among the many wonders you’ll find onstage at the Music Box Theater, where a technologically spectacular adaptation of “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” with Snook playing 26 roles, opened on Thursday.
What you won’t find is “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”
The 1890 magazine story by Oscar Wilde, which he novelized in 1891, has proved irresistible to adapters, thanks to its nifty plot device: a portrait that ages instead of the sitter. The more the gorgeous Dorian Gray falls under the decadent influence of Lord Henry Wotton, the uglier the painting by Basil Hallward becomes.
To get to that plot, though, adapters have to adapt out a lot because what Wilde wrote is less the psychological thriller they imagine than a perfumed treatise on aesthetic philosophy. Another thing usually sacrificed is the homosexual undercurrent, which, even after expurgation by the story’s first editors, was deep enough to drown in. Convicted of “gross indecency” in 1895, Wilde was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, with hard labor, and died, just 46, in 1900. “Dorian Gray” was part of the evidence.
Like the 1945 M-G-M movie, the current adaptation, written and directed by Kip Williams, downplays the treatise aspects. The queerness, though, is frank if complicated, in part because Snook, an Emmy-winning star of “Succession,” is still a woman while playing a man. Or not even a man. Her cherubic, shiny-cheeked Dorian is less the godlike 20-year-old of the novel than a barely pubescent boy.
His age lowered, his corruption is upped, making Wotton more of a villain than I think Wilde intended. Perhaps that’s good for a stage production, which needs the sharp contrast a page turner can finesse. Snook easily provides it. Her Wotton has a wonderful slouchy physicality and, as noted in the novel, a bewitching, sonorous voice, the better to deliver the Wildean aperçus. (“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”) Her closety Hallward is fantastically nervous, all tics and twitches, with a stammer to match. Her Dorian is beamish until besmirched.
Snook’s virtuosity is such that all three, whether live or recorded or both at once, are convincing and compelling, at least in the first of the play’s two hours. The other major character, Sibyl Vane, an actress Dorian adores but drops cold, is less fortunate, at one point reduced to a big head of curls sticking out of the floor of a miniature stage. Offering her purely for laughs despite her cruel demise, the play seems to flatter the Wotton in each of us.
Laughter is a strange thing to aim for in “Dorian Gray,” a story told in deep earnest, even if utterly unconcerned with morality. Art “is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way,” Wilde wrote to a young fan of the story. He is interested instead in the seriousness of sensation — no matter that it leads Dorian, over the course of 18 or so years, into a sinkhole of sex, drugs and murder without ever popping a wrinkle.
His portrait is another story. When we finally see it here, it is in the clever form of a selfie turned monstrous by a face distortion filter.
But Williams, as if sweetening a pill he fears will be too hard to swallow, encourages a winking attitude toward both the text and the technology. More than once Snook squabbles with one of her video incarnations over ownership of the narration. New characters lean into some shots, as if looking through glass at a reptile exhibit in which we are the reptiles. Extreme caricatures of secondary figures (ancient maid, assorted daft gentry) keep us at an even further remove than the cameras do.
This is not to say that plays may not benefit from an intermarriage with screens. For one thing, screen imagery can be a wonder in itself. Here, the video design, by David Bergman, naturally takes the lead; I’ve never experienced such saturated and realistic resolution onstage. The scenery and costumes (by Marg Horwell), the lighting (by Nick Schlieper) and the music and sound (by Clemence Wiliams) are likewise stunning, even by Broadway standards that have lately been raised by “Redwood,” “Maybe Happy Ending” and “Sunset Boulevard.”
As a group, the designers are no doubt part of the reason that Snook won an Olivier Award for her performance in the London production last year. Allowing one person to play so many roles — thus suggesting, and this is quite Wildean, that we each contain all of them — is something you could hardly achieve otherwise.
Unless, that is, you are Andrew Scott, whose one-man “Vanya,” now running Off Broadway, does exactly the same thing but with technology no fancier than a prank sound-effects generator. A mere gesture makes him a woman; a scarf an ass.
Yet it’s not technology itself that leaves “Dorian Gray” feeling so brittle where “Vanya” is a tear fest. It’s that the technology dominates all other values, including Wilde’s, often denying the human contact, and contract, that are at the heart of theater’s effectiveness. Some important scenes, though shot live onstage, must be watched onscreen because the screen itself blocks the upper half of Snook’s body. Her giant face is rendered in such super close-up that you might as well be an otolaryngologist; only her legs are left to do IRL acting.
By the time Dorian makes his final descent into madness, there is no real acting to be done anyway. There is only enunciating, as paragraphs of narrative are diverted into rushing mouthfuls of unintelligible high-speed monologue.
Still, what I missed most in this “Dorian Gray” was not Wilde; I find the story as he originally wrote it brilliant but so mannered that you can only sip it slowly, like absinthe. (The novel is more conventional.) What I missed was eye contact. The audience and actor are like disputants kept in different rooms, forbidden to see each other fully. The theater is in that sense empty. She, and we, might as well not be there.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Through June 15 at the Music Box Theater, Manhattan; doriangrayplay.com. Running time: 2 hours.
