THE ARTIST GETS GRILLED

By Richard Zoglin

Even today, in an age that has raised public humiliation to an art form, the downfall of Oscar Wilde is still shocking. He was one of Britain's leading playwrights, wits and public figures of the 1890s. But after his homosexuality was exposed in three scandalous public trials, he wound up disgraced, impoverished, imprisoned and, a few years later, dead. O.J. Simpson just has a little more trouble finding foursomes.

In Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde--a surprise success way-off-Broadway that has just moved to larger quarters--playwright and director Moises Kaufman has dramatized that fall with the sort of rapier stylization that Wilde himself would have admired. Nine actors facing the audience in two rows--a kind of oratorio at the Old Bailey--re-enact the legal proceedings and comment on them at the same time, using excerpts from newspaper accounts, biographical works and the memoirs of Wilde and others. It's a dazzling coup de theatre, at once compelling history and chilling human drama.

Wilde largely precipitated his own tragedy, when he rashly brought a libel suit against the father of his young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, for publicly calling him a sodomite. Wilde dropped the suit midway through the trial, but the damage was done: charges were soon brought against him for violating public morality. After one hung jury, he was convicted and sent to jail for two years.

At the heart of the play is the sparring between Wilde (Michael Emerson) and his courtroom antagonists. The flip, willfully perverse Wildean wit suffered the rude shock of having to defend itself under pitiless legal questioning. Asked if something he has written is true, Wilde replies, "I rarely think anything I write is true." He was a victim, of course, of Victorian prudery but also of the perennial clash between the aesthetic and the moral, the realm of art and the realm of life. Wilde realizes too late that it's an unfair fight. "One says things flippantly," he apologizes wanly at one point, "when one ought to speak more seriously." Has an artist ever spoken a sadder epitaph?

--By Richard Zoglin