An Intervention on Morality and Art
From the eyes of a poet: what things are important to think about? Gross Indecency is emotional, captivating and poetic, and does a great service to the life and memory of Oscar Wilde. Directed by Dave Horak, the play leaves you with lasting memories and creative questions long after its performance at Al & Trish Huehn Theater.
Compared to other plays and films dedicated to Wilde’s life story, Moisés Kaufman’s writing captures remnants of Wilde’s poetry throughout the story. The remnants give insight into his work and ultimately Wilde’s mind in a truly captivating way. Based on the 1895 trials, Gross Indecency keeps you on your toes, and actor Erik Sikoriski boldly demonstrated Wilde’s descent of confidence into anxiety from trial one to trial three.
While Victorian English can be confusing and hard to follow, the language is conveyed in a way where each word is understood and spoken with much depth into the characters. The solo monologues in the third trial, during Wilde’s breakdown, especially the stand out combination of lighting and sound, courtesy of Mari Maclean, forces the audience to feel Wilde’s anxiety. Then the static setting placed a harrowing emphasis on the words.
For a play that was made in the 1900s, it often brought a relevant and complex critique of modern western society with its views of the arts in all its forms. Wilde argued about morality and education while he was at the forefront of politics. He furthermore claims that art cannot be right or wrong, “Only well or badly written.” Gross Indecency covered other topics like the importance of keeping “aesthetic art education” in our society, not just economic based ones and sheds light on the idea of the “fragile progress” of creating art, and how being queer in this society can limit the validity of someone’s influence.
The play continued to be artistically informative, and in some ways mindbending. It leaves you reflecting for days on the meaning and importance of the value of art creation, while being set in a way where you weren’t just watching: you were the jury. Line after line left you with quotable pieces about the mysteries of life and being an artist. The acting was fluid, and the story overall has the same influence of a classic film you wish you could watch again and you may even leave inspired to read Wilde’s poetry.
