From the moment I walked into the Patricelli ’92 Theater on Saturday, Nov. 9 to see Spike Tape’s production of “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” I knew I was in for something special. The theater has a particular haunted quality, exacerbated by seeing it completely darkened in the middle of the day. The murmurs from the packed crowd taking their places in that darkness were evidence of a palpable excitement in the room. Those who knew the story seemed particularly ecstatic to see how it would be translated to the stage. The set struck me immediately: a gigantic picture frame in the center of the stage, draped with a huge piece of canvas cloth. The mind immediately reeled at what we would see staged in the next 2 hours and 10 minutes.
“The Picture of Dorian Gray,” directed by Kendall McDermott ’25, was an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s classic 1891 novel of the same name. The play concerns a beautiful young aristocrat, the eponymous Dorian Gray (Connor Wrubel ’25), who effortlessly charms all those around him. In the first scene of the play, his friend Basil (Zesun Hossain ’28) unveils a gigantic portrait of Gray staring listlessly off into the distance. Gray is at once struck by his own beauty and overwhelmed by the tragedy that this painting will be forever youthful and beautiful, while he himself will be gradually condemned, like all of us, to age and decrepitude. He wishes that it should be the other way around, that this portrait should grow old and that he should stay picture-perfect for his entire life. As this story is a fable, his wish comes true, and from there the true rot at the heart of Dorian Gray’s soul is revealed.
A discussion of the play cannot start anywhere else than with Wrubel’s performance, which was the sort of how-the-fuck-is-he-doing-this portrayal that boggles the mind of anyone who, like me, appreciates the work of the actor immensely, yet has a complete lack of the language needed to understand what great actors do to make their performances great. I’m comfortable describing when one of them has affected me, but as for the “how,” I’m at a loss. This is all to say Wrubel as the force driving the play was wonderful. As shown by his performance in John Earling’s ’27 recent short film “The Crooner,” Wrubel can do smarmy as well as anyone, playing effortlessly charming characters who nevertheless make us a little uneasy, as if our being too aware of their charm makes us want to put them at a distance. What we need to see here, though, is the tragedy in Dorian Gray, the ways in which his descent into immorality comes completely from an insecurity that he justifies to himself as representing a sort of joie de vivre. What he loves isn’t being young but living—but only living as a young person, of course.
I knew I was hooked even before Wrubel entered the stage, however. The immediate pleasure of “Dorian Gray” is simply in seeing Wilde’s language translated to the stage under the control of capable actors. The opening scene, a discussion between Basil and the wonderfully caddy Lord Henry (Pia Gissing ’28), practically had me doing the Vince McMahon meme as I reacted to literally every other line being truly iconic. I immediately remembered just how funny Wilde is, how his true skill is writing universals of human nature in as little as a single pithy sentence—one that, if delivered right, can get a full belly laugh out of an audience. I don’t always appreciate this quality of Wilde’s work on the page—I caught flak in high school English for saying “The Importance of Being Earnest” was “a little precious” (not a take I fully stand by, don’t come for me)—but that pithiness is exactly what makes his writing work on the stage. Especially in a play as patient as this one, which takes its time to reveal what it is really about, the ordinary conversations that make up most of the runtime need to be completely thrilling. In McDermott’s production, each conversation was like an Olympic ping-pong match where each rally had about a half-dozen trick shots. I imagine drilling the actors to get the pacing as quick as possible was what the text necessitated, and it was pulled off exceptionally well.
My adoration for the patter that these actors executed so well is not to diminish at all from how they were staged, which I also found to be ingenious. Of particular note should be the aforementioned use of the picture frame, which McDermott used as shorthand for a certain type of idolization that the text is so concerned with. Initially, the frame is used to present the titular picture (Evan Baum ’28, completely still), the object of Dorian Gray’s envious gaze. This representation is cemented again the next time Gray is confronted with his own desire, seeing Sibyl Vane (Gillian Churchland ’28) for the first time; this is the moment I really realized what McDermott was really doing with this frame, as Gray forced an audience member to literally vacate their seat in the front row so that he could watch Vane perform through it. The frame called attention not only to the superficial unreality of Gray’s desires but also to the unreality of the play itself, asking us to wonder what it is that we bring to the table in our readings of “Dorian Gray” that may make us overlook elements of the story itself. (I felt for Dorian—should I have?) This thought stuck with me later in the play as the frame began to give us images of a less ideal reality: first Sibyl Vane’s unimpressive performance that makes Gray turn on her, then, of course, the grotesque final vision of the portrait that shows all the age and vice that Gray’s ever-youthful face evidences none of. When even the art he turns to for self-affirmation can do nothing for Dorian Gray, the only thing for him to do is destroy it—and for this superficial man, that is tantamount to destroying himself.
Louis Chiasson can be reached at lchiasson@wesleyan.edu.
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