Once Shunned, Wilde Steals the Spotlight

At one time, the plight of Oscar Wilde seemed so terrible that the public pretended to avert its gaze. After his 1895 arrest in London for “committing indecent acts,” Wilde’s name was removed from the front of two West End theaters where his plays were running. Soon, the plays closed. His wife, Constance, was obliged to change her last name to Holland; the pariah Wilde went by the name Sebastian Melmoth in the few remaining years after his release from prison, where he served hard labor for the crime of homosexuality.

If for a while the name Oscar Wilde was obliterated from all “decent” society, we now cannot get enough of him. Since 1959, at least three films have been made on the riveting spectacle of his three trials. There are dozens of books in print, each offering ways to interpret Wilde’s life. This year stands out as truly Wildean. Moises Kaufman’s off-Broadway hit play, “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde,” opened last week at the Mark Taper Forum; Liam Neeson will star as Wilde in David Hare’s new play, “The Judas Kiss,” opening on Broadway in April; and Stephen Fry takes the role in a new British film to be released here in May.

Wilde came from a time in which hetero- and homosexual proclivities were divided into noncriminal and criminal behavior, a fact that all of his brilliance could not alter. Though he publicly denied his “crimes,” Wilde became a poster boy for the modern gay liberation movement. He remains a potent symbol for injustice in a time when the rights of gays to marry or serve their country are hotly contested. (A recent New York Times Magazine article called homophobia “the one exception to America’s persistent and ubiquitous nonjudgmentalism.”)

Unadorned, the transcripts of the three trials (edited by H. Montgomery Hyde) are singularly gripping drama, and Wilde’s observations on his own plight were so beautifully stated that scholars and dramatists continue to sift through the same well-known material over and over again. Still, we cannot leave the story alone. The gay rights movement has made it possible for us to look at Wilde’s story with less judgment and more frankness. But it has never succeeded in co-opting the man. Wilde is a figure of such eloquence and dignity that his story transcends all attempts at ownership.

If Wilde were a simple martyr, like, say, Alfred Dreyfus, his tale would not continually be told today. In his prime, Wilde was an esteemed essayist, speaker, poet and playwright, the prince of the bon mot. He liked to, as they say now, push the envelope. He enjoyed being talked about; he came to America on a lecture tour with curled hair, wearing knee breeches and carrying flowers. At home in London, he dined out with his young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, and a series of young men, inviting comment and censure from a society that observed strict rules of social behavior.

Yet he distrusted the persona he created with such apparent relish. “The supreme vice is shallowness,” he wrote, and he must have believed it. To some extent, he engineered his own downfall, and he flew into the face of tragedy with an impulse for self-knowledge that was both sublime and horrifying. While Wilde’s self-destructive tendencies can be seen as crusading or as foolish, the full, imperfect journey of his life demands a complex response: It renders simple moralizing absurd.

Perhaps surprisingly, Kaufman’s is the first major American drama to consider Wilde, who heretofore has been most often the property of British and Irish filmmakers and playwrights. (Kaufman is actually Venezuelan, though he lives in New York, where his company, Tectonic Theater Project, originated “Gross Indecency.”) Kaufman weaves together the trial transcripts and a wide compendium of archival and some new material; the efficiency of his technique assumes a general familiarity with the British author. No time is wasted on encouraging sympathy, which is likewise presupposed.

In the ordering of its facts, “Gross Indecency” encourages us to draw parallels between Wilde’s travails and our own. We leave the play wondering why governments are still compelled to see artists as subversives, and the play implicitly rebukes the official reaction to the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, as well as the subsequent virtual dismantling of the National Endowment for the Arts. At the moment, the play also touches inadvertently on Monicagate: It depicts a mass media and a citizenry compulsively feeding on the details of a sex scandal it knows it should not be interested in.

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The various dramatic tellings of Wilde’s life have been thus far remarkably similar. Until this year, all the British film and TV versions (“Oscar Wilde” starring Robert Morley in 1959; “The Trials of Oscar Wilde” starring Peter Finch in 1960; and “Forbidden Passion” starring Michael Gambon in 1985) followed the same route and began more or less in the same way--with Wilde’s curtain speech at “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” which is shown as the hubris before the fall. “I congratulate you on the great success of your performance,” the playwright told the audience, “which persuades me that you think almost as highly of the play as I do myself.”

Conversely, the new film “Wilde,” starring Fry and directed by Brian Gilbert, sends up a flare to announce its newness. It begins in Colorado, with cowboys on horses, whooping and shouting, “He’s here!” This is a depiction of Wilde’s 1882 trip to the silver mines in Leadville, which includes footage of bare-chested miners listening to Wilde speak. “Wilde” states very clearly that this is a Wilde for our times, whether or not it actually adds anything substantial to the oft-told drama. It is now permissible to show naked men copulating on the screen, and so the film does. We see Wilde in bed with Robert Ross and with John Gray, and we see Lord Alfred Douglas (Jude Law), making love to Wilde and having sex with other men as Wilde watches. In this version, the love that dare not speak its name becomes the love that’s actually quite chatty.

“Wilde” further distinguishes itself from the pack by rushing through the trial, as if it was just too familiar to go over yet again. But the film is essentially the same as the other films; the real Wilde has never yet been supplanted by a fictional one.

In his new play “The Judas Kiss,” playwright David Hare suggests that Wilde’s story has been told so often it is now in fact time to fictionalize it. Speaking on the phone from London, where the play is in rehearsal for a March opening before its arrival on Broadway, Hare says that his work depicts two scenes from Wilde’s life that are “entirely made up,” though they are based on actual events. One is the moment just before his arrest, when Wilde decides not to flee the country. The other takes place two years later, in Naples, when Wilde was reunited and lived briefly with Lord Alfred Douglas. “I’m not a fan of ‘faction’ [blending fact and fiction],” Hare said. “My play is pure speculation, stage poetry really.”

Hare’s approach signals another new chapter in the telling of the tale. If Wilde has been done to death, artists will continue to find new ways to approach him, just as every week, new pilgrims leave a fresh bundle of letters, photos, candles and poems on his Paris grave, which bears the inscription: “And alien tears will fill for him / Pity’s long-broken urn / For his mourners will be outcast men / And outcasts always mourn.”

That quatrain, from “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” represents the haunted writing of the post-tragedy Wilde. Earlier, in more flippant times, he famously remarked that he put his talent in his art and his genius in his life. Wilde could not have foreseen the tragic and majestic dimension that would eventually envelope this observation. For all of the pleasure they give, his plays never ascended to the heights from which Wilde could speak to the universal mourner, to the metaphoric outcast in all of us. Wilde’s greatest legacy was simply who he was.

* “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles, Tue.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7:30 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 2:30 p.m. Ends March 29. $29-$37. (213) 628-2772.