The creative resilience of the LGBTQ+ circle is at the delicious heart of Open Space Arts’s current, very inventive production of Dorian. Indeed, Phoebe Eclair-Powell and Owen Horsley’s play, which energetically retells Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray along with the story of Wilde and his manipulative real-life soulmate, is full of exuberant wit and infectious joy, among our community’s prime weapons against life’s travails.
Of course, Dorian Gray, perhaps Wilde’s most famous work, tells of the depravity of the titular character, a beautiful lad whose attic-kept portrait degenerates with his continuing, often murderous, excess. Wisely, the playwrights recognize the similarities between Gray and Bosie Douglas, the man who used and then abandoned Wilde after his conviction for gross indecency in 1895. Thus, the two stories here, enacted by a trio of extremely talented performers, resonate with many parallels.
Directing the three on Phoebe Huggett’s red yarn strewn, playground-like set, director Aaron Holland creatively utilizes dance, ballroom culture and the glittery heights of rave parties to create a colorful, prop heavy world. Emerging like the glory days of Studio 54 met with a sterling, dramatic decadence, Holland creates a show that is both enchanting and full of bitter heartbreak, highlighted by Wilde’s lonely downfall.
Thankfully, this universe is incredibly funny as well. Enacting multiple characters, the cast here deftly embraces that comic energy. As both Dorian and Bosie, Luke Gerdes is the perfect amount of petulance and confused anti-hero. Anthony Kayer, meanwhile, brings both broad emphasis and an incisive drollness to Wilde and Gray‘s epic Basil Hallward. Rounding them out is Brian Kulaga, whose courtroom puppeteering, during the reenactment of Wilde’s infamous trial, should go down in Chicago theater history,
While on stage only in spirit, special mention should go to intimacy coordinator Greta Zandstra, who creates one of the funniest oral sex scenes ever committed to the stage.
In the end, this, and the other uproarious physical details here, show how queers have survived such tragedies as Wilde’s imprisonment and his momentary erasure from literary history. For, as Dan Savage has, famously, said, “The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.”
Dorian runs through December 21st at Open Space Arts, 1411 W. Wilson in Chicago. More Information is available at www.openspacearts.org.