Gay playwright Oscar Wilde makes a case for gay rights in Cortland Repertory’s Gross Indecency

Venezuelan-born Moisés Kaufman has given us two big works for the stage. Both employ other peoples’ words to depict the victimization of gay, real-life figures. The better-known The Laramie Project (2000), about the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, has appeared often in town and around the world. The earlier Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1997) is making its area premiere at Cortland Repertory Theatre. It’s part of the company’s plan to rise above fun and games once in a season, like last summer’s much-acclaimed A Few Good Men. Any play that can employ Oscar Wilde’s actual words starts out with an advantage.

This material has been mined before. In 1960 there were two movies, Oscar Wilde with Robert Morley and The Trials of Oscar Wilde with Peter Finch, the latter based on John Furnell’s stage play, The Green Carnation. Much of the material is in Adrian Hall and Richard Cumming’s stage play Feasting with Panthers, produced by many regional theaters in the early 1970s and becoming a PBS TV-movie in 1974. More recently Stephen Frye appeared on the docket in Wilde (1998). Quite apart from our inexhaustible fascination with the subject, there is much leeway in how the words can be interpreted. In Kaufman’s view, augmented by Bill Kincaid’s direction, the great Oscar was surrounded by fools and miscreants.

As with Laramie Project, Kaufman is working with actual transcripts of the trials, augmented by newspaper accounts and later memoirs. His only invention is a none-too-hilarious mock interview with a supposed academic from New York University after the intermission. This was not too hard because scholar H. Montgomery Hyde had already published the transcripts of all three trials, as Kaufman readily acknowledges. While almost any trial can be restaged as theater, Kaufman successfully reshapes the three as Acts I, II and III, not the way they felt in life. Some of it is a matter of deleting the dull bits, but also focusing what remains to define character.

No one enters Gross Indecency without knowing quite a bit about Oscar Wilde, but Kaufman helps out the less-well prepared anyway. In spring 1895, Wilde, age 41, was at the top of his form with two hit plays running in the West End, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. Although married with two children, he enjoyed sexual relations with many men and preferred as a lover Lord Alfred Douglas, the son of the Marquess of Queensberry, author of the boxing rules. Interacting with Wilde was his friend, the mustachioed Irish-born American publisher Frank Harris, remembered today for his erotic memoir My Life and Loves. The well-born Dubliner, Edward Carson, the Marquess of Queensberry’s attorney and Wilde’s tormentor, later helped to carve out the statelet of Northern Ireland. Other contemporary commentators, like George Bernard Shaw and Queen Victoria, pop up as cartoon-like comic figures. In the end Wilde will be found guilty of “gross indecency,” as in the title, and sentenced to two years in prison.

What we may have forgotten is that Wilde initiated his legal problems by suing the Marquess for libeling him as a sodomite, misspelled by the old man as “sodmonite.” Wilde’s lawsuit may look like hubris when we all know that Oscar had indeed been sleeping with Lord Alfred, but bear in mind a comparable case 50 years later in another British court. Liberace sued the Daily Mirror tabloid for asserting that he was gay in 1959, and collected. Because this trial deals more directly with the Marquess’ philistine attacks on Wilde’s art and aestheticism (e.g., can a book corrupt or only be badly written?), it is potentially the most engaging of the three and figures well in the three films. Subsequently, Wilde became the defendant, first in a mistrial, secondly in a conviction.

In notes to the production, Kaufman tells us that he is influenced by Bertolt Brecht’s celebrated alienation effect, letting the words speak for themselves and not trying to tie the sentiments of the audience to any one character, regardless of what we feel for Wilde. What we get instead is a lot of shrill declamation, like a bad night on cable news. Worse, director Kincaid (and perhaps Kaufman) tilt us against the accusers. If a courtroom dialogue is to look like a drama, both sides must have a case. In a good version of Inherit the Wind, the William Jennings Bryan anti-evolution speaker must hold our attention. Here the Marquess (Kyle Kennedy) is a fat little buffoon in a top hat, like the cartoon capitalist on the Monopoly board. In the 1998 movie Wilde, Tom Wilkinson’s Marquess has much more going for him. It makes for more of a fight.

The switch from Wilde vs. Queensberry in the first act to the Crown vs. Wilde in the latter two completely changes the subtexts. Earlier on there’s much talk about art, or rather, the politics of art. Wilde’s tormentors sound like the red-state clones of Jesse Helms, trying to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts, whereas Wilde speaks for many audience members of any live theater presentation. 

As the focus turns to the gross indecencies (actions not to be mentioned in court or polite society) under criminal indictment, Wilde really finds his stage legs. Having earned top honors as a student of Classical languages, Wilde was well-prepared to make the best possible case for “Greek love.” Thus, even though the third act is weakened by our seeing that Wilde’s defense is doomed, it’s still the heart of the play because Saint Oscar makes such an impassioned and eloquent plea for gay rights.

Brian Runbeck, the only Equity player in the cast, is an unhappy choice for Wilde. Popular with the company, such as his memorable Elwood P. Dowd in the 2002 production of Harvey, Runbeck is at his best with some of the bon mots and the big third-act declaration, but he misses Wilde’s peacock power to dominate the scene. Wilde was a big man, and Liam Neeson portrayed him in the initial run of Gross Indecency, so it’s not necessary to look like the character portrayed. Runbeck is undercut by the postmodernist device of having him enter the stage in street clothes and put on his wig and Wendi Zea’s costume in the first scene. For much of the first act we almost lose sight of him. Gross Indecency as written is about a giant brought low by moral cockroaches. We are denied a view of that fall, only the giant in ruins.

Jo Winiarski’s polished wooden set aids the drama, however. The six platforms allow for different pitches of voice, as the gentlemen’s club ambiance invites us to see the well-bred behaving badly.  

This production runs through Saturday, Aug. 15. See Times Table for information.