In some methods, Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel, The Image of Dorian Greya horror-tinged Victorian critique of the perils of current in thrall to 1’s personal picture, is a narrative ready-made for 2025. The title character, a younger man of putting magnificence, begins the novel as a useless however apparently innocent naif. By the tip, his possession of a magical portrait that ages and bears the bodily marks of his sins whereas his personal face and physique stay unchangingly youthful and harmless has turned him right into a monster. It’s an deliberately superficial edit of the Faust story: A person barters away his soul in trade for his coronary heart’s want, however moderately than craving for one thing tinged with the Aristocracy—true knowledge, say, or love—he simply needs to be attractive, perpetually. He offers up substance for floor; that’s his tragedy.
And oh, does Sarah Snook’s new one-actor tackle The Image of Dorian Greynow on Broadway, make hay of the plain parallels to our time, through which social media has made the drive to keep up an idealized aesthetic extra highly effective than ever. Snook, who acquired a Tony nomination this week, performs 26 roles, with the assistance of elaborate wigs and much more elaborate camerawork. Principally, the latter is carried out by a crew of operators who observe her all through the present. However halfway via, Snook herself takes cost, utilizing a smartphone to broadcast herself to an enormous display suspended above the stage as she embarks on a hedonistic rampage. Taking part in with filters, she offers her face an unsettling porcelain-doll perfection, then zooms out, cackling with glee as she strips the impact away to point out her true face.
Placing a smartphone within the palms of maybe essentially the most notorious narcissist in literary historical past performs humorously, and ominously: Dorian isn’t simply thrilled by his supernatural skill to keep up a flawless visage; he’s additionally extremely conscious of—and titillated by—the hole between the false perfection he embodies and the reality of who he’s. The act of deception has turn into, for him, not only a conduit to pleasure, however a supply of enjoyment itself.
The Image of Dorian Grey is one among two starry new stateside arrivals from London through which a single actor performs each half in a traditional story tailored for a contemporary second; the opposite, Vanyastarring Andrew Scott, is quiet and introspective the place Dorian Grey is frenetic and exaggerated. And at a time when the omnipresence of social media has introduced a sort of self-conscious posturing to the cultural forefront, the 2 supply markedly totally different concepts about what it means to think about oneself as a personality, or a number of, to be watched.
The Wilde adaptation, written and directed by Kip Williams, twists that critique into one tailor-made for a really totally different sort of image-centric period from Wilde’s personal, utilizing the machine of a single actor to develop a pointed reflection on the methods through which performing a persona for others can rot away each hint of an inside life. Vanyatailored by Simon Stephens from Anton Chekhov’s turn-of-the-century authentic, makes for one thing of a counterpoint, suggesting that there’s extraordinary richness to be present in seeing your self because the embodiment of a number of intertwining voices, and letting these voices freely have interaction with each other.
Within the distinction between them lies a query bedeviling fashionable tradition because it decides whether or not new norms cast by social media are forces of corruption, alternative, or each: When is placing on a efficiency a perversion of the reality, and when is it a sort of manifestation—a manner of changing into extra freely oneself?
Dorian Grey is skeptical of its personal medium, stuffed with warnings concerning the risks of misinterpreting an act as actuality. In a scene partway via the play, Dorian brings his mates Basil Hallward, the painter of the ill-fated portrait, and Lord Henry Wotton, a gadabout intent on corrupting Dorian’s soul, to see his new fiancée, Sibyl Vane, act in a manufacturing of Romeo and Juliet. Snook, reside onstage, portrays Sibyl as she turns in an outrageously dangerous efficiency as Juliet; Dorian and his mates—three pretaped movies of Snook in numerous wigs and cravats—watch. (Snook acts throughout from filmed, fabulously costumed variations of herself all through the play, which works out to be half movie, half theater.)
So we get to see, in actual time, a multipronged scrutiny: The boys choose Sibyl; Dorian’s mates choose him for loving her (and, specifically, for seeming to have radically misrepresented her skills); Dorian, in flip, judges himself for being so obsessed on an incompetent actor. Later, Sibyl explains to Dorian that her dangerous efficiency was intentional, a renunciation of the emotive lies that performing requires, now that her love for Dorian has proven her how far more profound actual emotions will be. However to the lads observing her, her failure of efficiency equates to a failure of self. Her obvious ineptitude as an actress makes her irrelevant as a human being.
That every of those characters—each these doing the judging and people being judged—is performed by the identical individual crisply illustrates the scene’s larger level. Whereas the textual content of the play means that the superficiality Dorian and his friends embrace is a poison that destroys every part it touches (as it should quickly destroy Sibyl), the scene as Snook performs it produces a wierd secondary impact: We watch because the actor additionally primarily spreads the poison to totally different iterations of herself. Sure, the characters are displaying how a society over-interested in preening and posturing can obliterate the tender elements of an individual, such because the inchoate, even contradictory emotions of somebody newly in love. However the shades of Snook are displaying, too, how a single individual, overinvested in assembly these norms, can obliterate themselves.
There’s an overt ethical on this for the social-media age, cannily invoked by the manufacturing’s use of tropes recognizable to anybody who’s spent a couple of minutes on TikTok or Instagram. You may hardly open a kind of apps with out encountering a video through which a creator dons goofy costumes to play each half in a humorous little skit; on the Dorian Grey matinee I attended, the primary look of the a number of Snooks elicited figuring out giggles from viewers who had seen this trick earlier than. However these initially innocuous references slowly tackle a dire tinge. On the finish of her smartphone-editing spree, Snook takes an Ellen DeGeneres–at-the-Oscars-style selfie with the viewers, then gleefully manipulates her personal beautiful visage in it right into a monstrously distorted masks—the closest the play involves displaying us the horrors of Dorian’s hidden portrait. The truth that she will toggle backwards and forwards between the perfect image and the grotesque one is a supply of manic pleasure for her: What a thrill, to have the ability to current your self as excellent whereas figuring out that you’re, at coronary heart, willfully ugly.
The message to us is evident—as a result of everybody reflexively smiles to take their half within the horrifying tableau. (I did.) It’s straightforward for these watching the present—or studying the unique novel—to scorn the unthinking ease with which Dorian and his enablers hand over their humanity for the satisfaction of delivering a flawless efficiency for his or her friends. (“I like performing. It’s so far more actual than life,” Lord Henry Wotton says within the guide.) However we’ve simply proven that we’re on the best way to doing the identical. We’re a part of the efficiency too.
One of many obvious prices of placing ourselves always on show is the danger of flattening the complexity of what lies inside. But there is perhaps a approach to categorical ourselves, to be in and of the world, with out dropping our inside richness. Vanya means that with the appropriate contact, doing so may even be a type of liberation.
In distinction to Dorian Grey’s technological wonderland, Vanya is starkly analog. The props that Scott makes use of onstage are notably low-key: a tape participant, a participant piano, an electrical kettle. And though he initially distinguishes his characters from each other with telling equipment and mannerisms, he finally involves differentiate them with little greater than a shift in expression and voice. So we come to see them rising, one after the opposite, from inside him, passing throughout his face as if Scott’s feelings every tackle the characters of absolutely realized individuals.
Vanyawhich examines the crumbling relationships inside a household managing monetary woes whereas caught in shut quarters on a rustic property, is a narrative concerning the methods individuals delude and deprive themselves, and the way their intimate misunderstandings of themselves can ripple outward, quietly altering the course of different lives too. The plot is propelled by on a regular basis self-deceptions, the sort that might make somebody marry a companion they really dislike—as Helena, the attractive younger spouse of the delusional movie auteur whose late first spouse owned the property, involves suspect she may need—or imagine that their beloved native physician’s ingesting actually isn’t that massive of an issue.
However as in Dorian Greythe interactions of a set of intently linked characters tackle a special that means when all of them have the identical face. So when Scott performs a scene through which Helena sees completely nicely what the plain however good-hearted Sonia, the auteur’s daughter by his first spouse, can not—that Sonia’s ardour for the alcoholic physician is rarely going to be reciprocated—it reads much less as a fragile distinction of notion between two mates than as a cautious compartmentalization of reality inside a self. One half adores; the opposite half is aware of that that adoration could also be unreturned however—at the very least at first—lets it proceed, out of an understanding that if the love have been quenched, some important a part of the shared self would die.
You should be each a part of your self to be all of your self, Scott’s delicate exploration of those linked characters suggests. It’s pure to have many alternative selves, and the methods they work together, when given the prospect to talk actually with each other—as Scott’s quiet, tormented souls so movingly do—will be highly effective. At each the beginning and the tip of VanyaScott walks to the sting of the stage and flicks a swap on the wall, sending the theater into darkness. He has full management over how a lot we see; he’s letting us in as a favor, not as a result of he’s within the consideration. The viewers has been elective all alongside.
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