Reworking of Wilde is tonally out of control
Gray (out of 4) By Kristofer Van Soelen, directed by Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster. Until Oct. 1 at The Commons, 578A College St. Theatreinamorata.com.
This world-premiere play updates Oscar Wilde’s famous 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, setting it in the art world of today’s Toronto.
It is the first full-length production by Theatre Inamorata, set up by Hillary Carroll, Michelle Langille, Tennille Read and Lesley Robertson four years ago to produce classical work for women — something harder than they anticipated, they reveal in a program note, because there are few classic plays out there with enough to offer them as female artists.
When playwright Kristofer Van Soelen approached them with a first draft of this play — which flips genders in Wilde’s story so that it’s almost entirely peopled by strong, flawed, interesting women — they embraced the idea and have worked with him extensively on the script, as has director Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster.
On paper, you can see why the play appealed: The writing is smart and timely, reflective of many hot-button issues. Dorian here is a naive and conventionally attractive woman (Read) who wafts into Toronto from Caledon and falls in with the ambitious artist Jane (Ximena Huizi) and brash gallery owner Opal (Langille).
Jane is infatuated with Dorian and is creating a sculpture of her (a takeoff from the painting in Wilde’s original). But Dorian takes to the demimonde of art openings, vintage bubbly and idealism Opal leads her into. Our anti-heroine then becomes an instant social-media sensation.
Van Soelen writes the actress Sybil, with whom Dorian becomes briefly besotted, as a trans woman (played by Sydney Violet-Bristow in her first professional stage role), and Opal’s wife Laura (Mamito Kukwikila) as Black, allowing for some exploration of intersectionality, trans rights and transphobia.
Unfortunately, the work’s potential does not translate onto the stage. Part of the concern is the apparently low budget and the very small playing area: it looks threadbare and cramped, which feels paradoxical for a play about lavishness and the pursuit of true beauty.
The production’s biggest concern is that the actors do not fully inhabit these characters as they experience complex, heightened emotions and — in the case of Dorian — go on a major personal journey in the course of the play.
Huizi has a strong stage presence and impresses initially as the introverted Jane. Langille does a lot with some of the very brash lines Van Soelen has written for Opal (“I’m feeling such a lady boner for high art right now, it’s insane”).
But the other performances largely stay on the surface.
The play goes to some strange and excessive places, but the production is so uneven that these come across as melodrama. It was during a scene midway through, in which Dorian and Sybil shack up in the basement of Opal and Laura’s gallery and recite Shakespeare, that it became clear the production’s tone was slipping out of control.
The ironic comment that the play tries to offer about snobbery and excess increasingly does not come through, so it seems to be alternately condemning or celebrating the characters, rather than critiquing the society and systems in which they circulate.