Kip Williams on Giving ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ the Multimedia Treatment

Now enjoying at the Music Field Theatre, The Picture of Dorian Grey is an enthralling multimedia tour de power starring Sarah Snook that seamlessly integrates dwell and pre-recorded video with dwell stage efficiency. The manufacturing is directed by Kip Williams, who additionally conceived this new adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel.

In the manufacturing, Snook portrays not solely the three central roles—the hedonistic aristocrat Lord Henry, painter Basil Hallward, and the good-looking titular Dorian Grey—but additionally greater than 20 further minor characters. All through, she’s supported by a dynamic interaction of shifting video screens, dwell digicam feeds, and state-of-the-art cell phone know-how.

The story follows the impressionable Dorian, who, upon seeing his freshly painted portrait, pledges to commerce his soul for everlasting youth and wonder. As he indulges in a life of scandal and depravity, Dorian’s youthful look stays unblemished, whereas his portrait visibly exhibits the proof of his rising religious and ethical decay.

Shortly after the Broadway premiere of The Picture of Dorian Grey, I spoke with Williams about his virtuosic star performer, his strategy to adapting Wilde’s legendary novel, and his use of video know-how to vogue a cutting-edge theatrical expertise.

What was your first contact with The Picture of Dorian Grey?

I learn the novel as a teen when performing in a manufacturing of The Significance of Being Earnest, which was my [introduction] to Oscar Wilde. The guide was amongst a quantity of novels that have been massively informative of my grownup and queer awakening. About seven years in the past, I returned to a quantity of works of Victorian gothic literature. In that period, “individualism” was coined in France. You might have this simultaneous burgeoning progressive thought, the progress of the center class and unfold of schooling, and the notion of the separation between private and non-private life rising. There have been lots of questions round faith, however there was additionally this type of puritanical pushback. So the tales that emerged from this period grappled with that societal stress. Dorian Grey jumped out to me as being the most intensely fashionable of all of these books. It has an nearly prophetic imaginative and prescient of a world that was obsessive about youth, magnificence, materials achieve, and with the particular person. I used to be instantly struck that this was a narrative for now.

Why did you adapt the story for a single actor?

Inside that you may specific Wilde’s philosophy that life is a grand act of theater, the place persons are performing completely different variations of themselves primarily based on which context they’re in—be that public or personal. And you’ll specific this notion {that a} human being is a multi-form complicated creature that accommodates inside it myriad lives and myriad sensations.

Did you at all times have a feminine performer in thoughts?

It was an instinctual resolution, that I additionally intellectually understood would resonate inside the work. The bulk of the characters are male. Having Sarah carry out these characters [gives] a essential perspective upon sure varieties of male habits which might be at play inside the narrative. It’s additionally fairly subversive in the means during which it expands the story’s understanding of gender, however performs with the gender binary and deconstructs it at the identical time. So it feels very true to the queer spirit of Wilde’s novel. And in some methods, it’s true to my entry level into Wilde as properly, as a result of I performed Cecily Cardew in that manufacturing of The Significance of Being Earnest that I discussed. I used to be at an all-boys faculty and the junior college students performed the feminine roles.

We should discuss Sarah Snook and her fabulous tour de power embodying 26 completely different characters on this manufacturing. How did her casting come about?

We each went to the Nationwide Institute of Dramatic Artwork in Sydney. Sarah had simply left after I arrived, however there was already a buzz about this unbelievable redheaded actress. I got here to know her over the years via transferring in related social circles and seeing her on stage and display screen. Then she performed [Joan of Arc in] Saint Joan [during] my first 12 months as inventive director at the Sydney Theatre Firm. I used to be fully blown away by her efficiency.

It was a extremely fascinating adaptation, the place this younger Australian playwright Emme Hoy was writing authentic monologues, inserting them inside the Bernard Shaw play. Over the preview interval, as Emme was responding to the viewers and writing fully new monologues, Sarah would go on stage every evening having discovered a handful of new monologues and simply knocking it out of the park. I keep in mind watching her in that present and [thinking], not solely is she prodigiously gifted as a performer, she has an unbelievable sense of drama and a remarkably fast thoughts. I knew that whoever was going to carry out this function in Dorian Grey needed to have the chameleonic presents of a fantastic actor and in addition the form of starvation and rigor and dramaturgical relentlessness {that a} function like this asks an actor to own. So yeah, she was the one.

I’m curious to understand how you see Sally Potter’s Orlando, which you’ve introduced up in interviews, as having influenced your work.

One of the issues that’s so outstanding about it’s the means [Potter] radically breaks the movie kind in how she tells the story. Tilda Swinton as Orlando consistently breaks the fourth wall, wanting instantly into the digicam. From that I noticed the risk of a complicit relationship between character and viewers by way of the digicam lens that was intensely theatrical. It’s very a lot akin to when an actor instantly turns to speak to an viewers—a Shakespearean soliloquy of types.

We’ve seen it extremely profitable in recent times in tv exhibits like Fleabag and I Could Destroy You, the place an viewers can develop an identification and complicity with the character by way of that direct handle via the digicam lens. That’s knowledgeable my complete relationship to utilizing digicam on stage. [As opposed to the camera being a] eliminated voyeuristic presence, for me it was an energetic extension of the audiences’ act of watching a performer on stage.

It really works so powerfully in The Picture of Dorian Grey as a result of Dorian is very conscious of the means during which he’s perceived by these round him and is caught in a bind of making an attempt to stop the world from seeing who he actually is. However [he’s also] watched with full fact by his portrait. In my adaptation, the viewers takes on, by way of the digicam, that perspective. In reality, you by no means see the portrait—you solely take on the portrait’s POV of watching and regulating Dorian. In that sense, I believe, it’s the identical means during which Wilde understood life as being like an act of theater during which individuals have been performing concepts of themselves and revealing and concealing truths.

How would you particularly describe “cine-theater,” the time period that you just use to seek advice from the hybrid of dwell efficiency and video you use on this manufacturing?

Previous to Dorian, I’d finished about seven productions that used video in them, and it was at all times dwell. That was a basic rule for me, basically as a result of, , one of the issues that defines theater is that it takes place in the now. With utilizing screens, I used to be at all times involved with the spatial relationship between character and viewers, and the way the display screen may assist crack open the dramaturgy of the storytelling. When it got here to Dorian, it was the first time I ever used prerecorded [material] in my follow—[and] it was a terrifying breaking of the rule.

However in its purest essence, it solid what I name the cine-theater kind. The pre-recorded component is at all times enjoying out towards, and in live performance, with dwell efficiency and dwell video, and it’s built-in in such a means that the prerecorded performances of Sarah really feel as if they’re dwell and taking place in the second. In these pure moments of cine-theater, you could have a body that’s interlacing dwell and prerecorded imagery—actually colliding inside the identical body in the identical second on stage—that’s the most enjoyable. It takes [a lot] of element and technical precision to make that really feel easy and [spontaneous]. It’s fairly magical when that occurs.

It does really feel easy, however one can’t miss the plethora of “spike” marks on the stage, which point out how essential the positioning of the crew and the props on stage are to this present. Does it turn into a form of elaborate choreography?

I studied dance after I was a toddler and lots of my main influences in theater-making are both choreographers or come from a dance background—like Pina Bausch, Robert Wilson, and Merce Cunningham. As a result of theater is at first a spatial storytelling artwork kind, I’m most taken with the means in which you’ll convey story via the physique and thru area. For me, the choreography of the present is how the visible musical rating of the story unfolds.

So whereas there are a number of hundred marks on stage that must be hit with millimeter precision, the extra intense specificity of motion is definitely about the rhythm of motion between these marks. It’s how Sarah, the digicam crew, the costume crew, and the mechanists who transfer the set parts construct and develop the motion from particular level to particular level. That’s the residing, respiration organism of the piece that has its bend and flex every evening. It’s a form of music that will get launched by the ensemble each night. And it’s an ensemble, . Sarah and I speak lots about this Wildean paradox inside our manufacturing: Though it’s a one-person present, you see greater than a dozen individuals in the curtain name every evening.

Did you could have any qualms about adapting—re-writing—the Wilde textual content?

Yeah, it was a massively daunting job adapting Wilde, notably provided that the kind that I selected required a singular narratorial voice. It was paralytically terrifying starting to write down it after which placing it in entrance of an viewers [that knows] his writing properly. Wilde’s textual content was the start line and there’s quite a bit of authentic writing in the play. It was his tone, his rhythm, his sense of humor, his idiosyncratic use of language that wanted to be maintained. I believe it’s one of Wilde’s most susceptible items of writing, in how a lot he excavates the tougher and private features of his id inside his work. I needed to honor that.

With The Picture of Dorian Grey, Wilde is far nearer to the character Basil who’s too afraid to exhibit his portray as a result of he has, inside it, revealed the secret of his personal soul. At the identical time, there have been parts of the novel that I felt could possibly be shifted and expanded to turn into extra resonant and related for a recent viewers—concepts round gender and sexuality that maybe he wasn’t capable of write about, or maybe considering has shifted round. And, besides for 2 very particular moments, the place the manufacturing itself aesthetically leans in a extra modern space, I tried by and huge to take care of his voice.

You’ve remarked that the novel presents three completely different features of Wilde. What are these three features precisely?

He has this quote the place he says that the three central characters are three completely different aspects of his id. Lord Henry is who individuals suppose he’s publicly, Basil is who he’s privately, and Dorian is who he aspires to be. I didn’t uncover that quote till after I had written the adaptation and conceived the work directorially, however with [this version], the place one actor performs all the characters to precise the notion of the a number of selves that exist inside all of us, I felt validated. It was type of an indication from the Wildean universe to say you’re on the proper monitor.