Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde
By Albert Williams
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Yet Gross Indecency’s Wilde and Death of a Salesman’s Willy have a commonality of soul. Both are men of words whose rhetoric–no matter how outlandish in Wilde’s case or cliched in Willy’s–expresses a deeply felt belief in who they are. Both are dreamers, creators of personal truths derived equally from experience and fantasy. Both, unfortunately for them, have a taste for chippies: Willy committed adultery with a brassy secretary he met on the road, and Wilde kept company with a string of young working-class men whom he later called “gilded snakes [whose] poison was part of their perfection.” Neither man can quite reconcile his lofty ideals with his tawdry appetites; living in societies whose rules contradict the realities of human nature, both men are forced to lie–then are persecuted for being liars. Wilde’s ruin comes in the English law courts, where he’s convicted of “gross indecency”; Willy is punished by the accusing silence of his estranged, embittered son. Both are finally destroyed.
Gross Indecency, originally presented last year by New York’s Tectonic Theater Project (the off-Broadway production is still running) and now receiving its Chicago premiere at the Court Theatre, is drawn almost exclusively from preexisting sources: court transcripts and newspaper articles; correspondence and commentaries by such Wilde contemporaries as George Bernard Shaw, Frank Harris, and Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas (aka Bosie); biographical accounts by H. Montgomery Hyde, Sheridan Morley, and others; and, crucially, Wilde’s own writings, including his essays “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” “The English Renaissance in Art,” and “De Profundis,” his jailhouse tract. Moises Kaufman, the play’s author and original director (special credit is also given to dramaturg Stephen Wangh), has eschewed conventional dramatization in favor of a semidocumentary style–not in order to arrive at objective truth but to point out how elusive, perhaps illusory, objective truth is in matters of the heart.
By the play’s end it’s clear that Wilde’s case was not about “truth” and “lies” but about conflicting truths. (“A man rightly accused of homosexuality is perfectly entitled to plead not guilty…if he believes, as Wilde certainly did, that homosexuality is not a crime,” the play quotes Shaw as saying.) Gross Indecency reminds us that sincerely sought truth is complex, ending not in answers but in more questions. Ultimately the mysteries of Wilde’s downfall–why he pursued his lawsuit, why he didn’t leave England to escape prosecution, to what extent he understood the nature of his sexuality, the sincerity of his postprison penitence–remain mysteries: this is a courtroom drama with an ending that solves nothing.
