Moment Work by Moises Kaufman

Author:Moises Kaufman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

Three Trials, One Throughline

There was one more problem we had to solve: Oscar Wilde was tried three times, and much of the information brought up in each of the three trials was very similar. How could we tell this story and not repeat ourselves?

This is where we started to map the throughline of Wilde’s defeat. As we delved into each trial, we noticed the changes in Wilde’s behavior: At the beginning of the first trial, Wilde was at the height of his fame; he had two plays running in the West End and was one of the most popular playwrights in Europe. He felt so secure in his superior intelligence and his social standing that it was he who brought a libel charge against his lover’s father. The first trial started as a public demonstration of Wilde’s brilliance and wit. By its end, however, he was defeated and forced to drop the charges against the Marquess of Queensberry, all his plays were shut down, he was bankrupted, and his family had to flee England. The second trial found Wilde in a very different emotional landscape. He was finally aware of the gravity of his situation, and he’d seen the rage of a society he thought adored him. He was also exhausted and shocked, and in his replies in court, his artistic ideas collided with the nature of his relationship with the rent boys he was accused of hiring. Sexuality and aesthetics mingled. By the third trial, Wilde was depleted and lost. How could he endure the same questions and accusations in public for a third time?

With so much of the same material repeated in each trial, how could we keep the play from becoming redundant? We also needed to convey Wilde’s emotional journey throughout the period of the trials. This need to do two things at once—to communicate Wilde’s experience and simultaneously give our audience a way into a great mass of complex and potentially repetitive material—guided us in both how to create the play and how to stage it.

Our presentation of the first trial, where Wilde was at the top of his game, was an annotated courtroom drama of sorts, where Wilde publicly and intentionally outshines (and almost manages to outsmart) his opponents. So this act was the most realistic of the three.

The second trial found Wilde beaten down by Victorian London’s vitriol toward him. This was also the trial in which the prostitutes were allowed to tell their version of events. In rehearsals, we created several moments where actors re-created their encounters with Wilde, and many involved the prostitutes in their underwear. At that time, our costume designer, Kitty Leech, started to bring in pictures of Victorian underwear, displaying them on the wall in the rehearsal room. She explained that certain garments had openings that allowed johns to fondle the prostitutes without completely undressing them. Kitty’s understanding of the customs and behaviors of the period as exemplified by these articles of clothing was immediately absorbed into our theatrical vocabulary, and the actors began to use the underwear in making moments and rehearsing scenes.

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