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REVIEWS:

Gay People's Chronicle
A fresh look at the life of England's 'bon vivant"
By Tamara Murphy

The Cleveland area has long been blessed with access to terrific theatre, and the current offering from the Cleveland Theatre Company is certainly no exception. A Wilde Evening is a highly original, powerful and fresh look at the life of Oscar Wilde.

Written by Gordon Williams, a native Ohioan and winner of multiple awards, including a number of Emmys and a Silver Medal from the International Film Festival of New York, A Wilde Evening uses Wilde's letters, transcripts of his infamous sodomy trial, and original dialogue to create a rich drama infused with passion, wit, and brilliance.

Director Wayne Turney, another Emmy Award winner, and a Cleveland favorite best known for his work with the Cleveland Play House, refers in his directors' notes to Wilde's insistence that he never repeated himself in style. Indeed, Turney and Williams seem to take this cue from Wilde.

A Wilde Evening is a stylistic changeling which in Act I flits from place to place and topic to topic, reflecting surface brilliance off of each newly exposed facet. As Act II begins, the brilliance is stripped away, leaving a darkness seething in its depth. Gradually, though, the dark is once again illuminated, this time with a light, which seems to radiate from the very heart of the piece, infusing it with warmth and strength.

The dynamics of the play mimic those of Oscar Wilde's life. At one time the toast of English society, revered for his scathingly incisive wit, Wilde was tried and convicted of sodomy and sentenced to two years hard labor. While historical interpretation has indicated that Wilde repented of his "evil" while imprisoned and died shortly after his release a broken man, Williams' treatment offers a different view.

Scott Plate, the veteran actor charged with the enormous task of playing Wilde, says of Wilde's "repentance":

"What he repented of was the wasting of his gift; the casting of pearls before swine."

Plate, a passionate artist who glittered with intensity, spoke of growing up gay, with no examples of the strength and beauty of what he is. Plate saw in his preparation for this role "" way of finding a role model. This became not only about his redemption, but mine as well."

Williams' treatment, and Plate's portrayal indicate more a search for purity. Act II is what Plate refers to as a "dark night of the soul," where Wilde finds forgiveness-not only for his former lover Lord Alfred Douglas for his apparent desertion of Wilde, but forgiveness for himself for wasting his gift, for allowing himself to become fodder for a mass of hangers-on without true caring or comprehension.

Plate is drawn to the constant examination of inversion in the work. The ugliness seething behind the successes of Wilde's early years, evidenced in his vilification by the same people who had sung his praises such a short time before, and the underlying beauty and strength that Wilde finds within himself amidst the pain and filth of prison life. "The very power of his ideas are what enabled him to escape from the squalor he was in." explained Plate.

Indeed the themes explored come dangerously close to home. Artists are coming under increasing pressure in reference to the "morality" of their work. Gay visibility is at an all-time high, but anti-sodomy laws remain on the books in twenty states. AS Plate explained, "Gay is not only now-it is not a time, nor an era-but always."

A Wilde Evening is a vital and important piece of work. From the dance-hall style moments to Wilde's "dark night of the soul," the piece is exceptionally well written, and well-played. Joining Plate is an ensemble of both experienced and student performers, and they all contribute to the outstanding production. The only disappointment was the tiny audience. Why there aren't more bodies in those seats is a puzzle.

Akron Beacon-Journal

Play is earnest attempt to capture Wilde by Russ Musarra

There is a telling moment in A Wilde Evening, Gordon Williams' new play about the 19th century poet, playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde that captures the essence of a man at the top of a mountain--just before the fall.

On trial in London for indecency and facing a parade of witnesses whose testimony would confirm his homosexual practices, Wilde is encouraged to fight the charge by a friend who believes he is innocent.

"This can't be true," the friend says.

"Of course it's true. I'm guilty." says Wilde in his most arrogant manner.

Scott Plate's portrayal of Wilde is the best thing about the Cleveland Theatre Company and Cleveland State University Theater Arts production at the university's Factory Theatre.

Plate exudes the idiosyncratic charm of the Irish born writer who was his era's chief spokesman for the art-for-art's sake aesthetic movement, and with equal skill conveys the depths of Wilde's despair after his conviction in 1895 and imprisonment.

The actor makes Wilde's own words come alive in a long--perhaps 35-minute--soliloquoy derived from the writer's letters to Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas, his lover, during two years in prison.

The speech is skillfully crafted from its many sources and passionately delivered, revealing Wilde's transformation of character, but has the effect of drowning much of what precedes it.

Watching A Wilde Evening at its opening performance June 28, I was reminded of my impression of another new play, Carlyle Brown's The African Company Presents Richard III, which the Cleveland Play House presented in January.

Brown was obviously deeply immersed in his subject matter, a real event in which members of a black theater company were arrested for performing Shakespeare in 1882, but failed to share enough of his knowledge with the audience. The result was that the play's focus didn't emerge until Act 2.

Similarly, playwright Williams is an enthusiastic student of Wilde who would have served his audience better by providing more background and better developed characters, especially those of Wilde's wife Constance, Bosie and Bosie's father, the Marquess of Queensberry.

Constance and Bosie, who are portrayed by Pamela Clay and Rick Shartzer, have little to do but look attractive and less to say.

The Marquess, played by Eugene Hare, is effectively used to demonstrate Wilde's indifference to public opinion in a confrontational scene in which the angry father becomes, in Wilde's mind, Lady Bracknell, a character from his play The Importance of Being Earnest.

Hare, who is muscular and quite bald, dissolves--through a quick change during the confrontation--into a gowned and turbaned dowager. It's a funny bit that reveals much about Wilde but little about the Marquess.

Director Wayne Turney and his 13-member cast serve the material well, but it can only be hoped that the playwright consider A Wilde Evening a work in progress and return to the drawing board.

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Director's Notes:

This evening's performance is a landmark event for the Cleveland Theatre Company. It marks the first full mainstage production of a World Premiere produced by an organization better known for its productions of "classics." But while this play is in many ways non-realistic, it also contains much that may be regarded as "classic." Gordon Williams' A Wilde Evening is a fresh look at the legend of was Oscar Wilde.

There was, at the end of the Nineteenth Century, a m ovement away from the Realism exemplified by our sister piece in Repertory this summer, Chekhov's The Sea Gull. While England contributed little to this movement, anumber of English critics, and a handfull of practitioners, shared views, if not methods with the French Symbolists. In England, the movement was known as "aestheticism.," or more commonly, "Art-for-Art's Sake." The progenitor of Aestheticism was Professor Walter Pater who with John Ruskin at Oxford attracted a flamboyant following of young men who were satirized by Gilbert and Sullivan in Patience, bits and snatches of which you will recognize tonight.

Oscar was the movement's primary spokesperson. Indeed, his dandyism, his aggressivce hedonism and his equally aggressive indifference to public opinion made him a celebrity a full decade before he accomplished anything in the field of letters. The author of Lady Windermere's Fan, and The Importance of Being Earnest also left a considerable body of theoretical and critical writings which make his views on Art and the drama unmistakable. He declared: "As a method, Realism is a complete failure, and the two things that evey artist should avoid are modernity of form and modernity of subject matter...It is only the modern that ever becomes old fashioned." In his notorious trial, he insisted that he never repeated himself in style. Gordon Williams took this as a clue to the way Oscar's story should be told. The script shifts not only from place to place and topic to topic but from style to style as well.

As Oscar said, "Realism is the Enemy of Art!"

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