Sarah Snook’s Dorian Gray and Achieving the Impossible in Art

on formal innovation as necessity vs. affectation

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image via doriangrayplay.com

I have a pet theory that whatever makes a creative project feel impossible is also the key to how to make it great. I started thinking about impossibility in this way while confronting the internal contradiction in my memoir, Negative Space, where the aim of the book was to get to know my father, but, him being dead, that goal was by definition impossible. Finding ways to try to do it anyway—looking closely at his art, reading his notebooks, interviewing everyone who knew him—became the core of the project. Once I started thinking about impossibility as an artistic diving rod, I began to notice that pretty much all of my favorite formally innovative books are written the way they are in attempts to get around their own insurmountable obstacles: a question that’s impossible to answer, an archive that doesn’t exist, a contradiction that can’t be reconciled.

Sarah Snook’s one-woman production of The Picture of Dorian Gray reminded me that a live performance is the ultimate reckoning with impossibility, and the innovations made to get around the limitations of real-time action have always been what makes theater special as a medium. The impossibility here was how to have Snook play multiple different characters in the same scene when there’s no time for her change wigs and costumes or even positions on stage between every witty Wilde-ian back-and-forth. The solution is what has seared this show into my brain forever.

When the show starts, the stage is a plain black box, with neon tape marking spots all over the floor and a giant blank screen hanging from the ceiling downstage. Snook walks onstage, behind the screen, with three camera operators rolling video cameras on tripods. Her face appears on the screen, framed in close-up, and she speaks the opening lines of Wilde’s novel directly into one of the cameras. She acts out the opening scene, still entirely on screen, delineating between the narrator and the two characters (Basil Hallward and Lord Henry) via camera angles and shifts in her voice and facial expressions, holding up a cigarette in one hand when she’s Henry and a paint brush in the other when she’s Hallward. This, already, is delightful, if more on the level of a really good live reading than a full-fledged play.

Then: Enter Dorian Gray. When the title character arrives, one camera operator puts a blonde wig on Snook and another helps her into a white jacket, while she’s still speaking lines—now standing off to the side so the audience is watching her directly rather than via the screen. And a few moments after that, while Snook is in character as Dorian, a pre-recorded Snook now in full costume as Lord Henry (complete with mustache) appears on screen to interact with the live Snook-as-Dorian. And then we’re off.

Using a combination of pre-recorded video, quick on-stage costume changes, camera angles projecting the live action onto additional screens that come down from the ceiling as needed, and later speaking into an iPhone and adding and removing filters to denote different characters (and Dorian’s uncanny youth as yassification—I know, but I promise it works), Snook manages to interact with many versions of herself all at once. It’s frenetic and relentless; it feels like being inside someone’s mind as they go completely insane. It’s incredible.

This is not, of course, the first live performance to incorporate pre-recorded video. The last one I saw was a Shakespeare in the Park Hamlet a few summers ago where a video ghost was projected onto the castle walls. I remember thinking the effect was… fine. Here though, this mixed medium is pushed to its limits. (The director of this production, Kip Williams, specializes in what he calls “cine-theatre.”)

One of the most amazing effects of this show was actually an after-effect, a delayed delight in realizing a few days after I saw it, that when looking back at specific scenes, I couldn’t always remember which Snook was live on stage and which was pre-recorded on video. My mind blurred the distinction, so the version of the play that exists in my memory is the impossible version that Snook and Williams were trying to approximate: multiple Sarah Snooks on stage at once, performing together in real time.

The work-around of video could have deflated the magic of live performance if not handled as innovatively and interestingly as it was here. But with the way they mixed the two mediums, Williams and Snook managed to not only hold onto the immediacy of theater, but complicate and refract it with the addition of video—while also counterbalancing the limitations of video (in this context, the main limitation being that it’s just not the same as seeing the actor in the flesh, on stage mere yards from where you sit) by always having one live Snook on stage with the recorded Snooks. They found the overlap between the limits of two different mediums, and they achieved the impossible in the process.

This is what it means for form to follow content; for innovation to feel intrinsic to a work because it’s necessary to accomplish what the work is setting out to do. It’s a harmony that can’t be faked when imposed from the outside. This feeling, that a creative workaround has made the impossible possible, is what distinguishes, to my mind, formal innovation that feels thrilling and ingenious from formal trickiness that feels extraneous and frankly irritating.

It took me a long time to figure out why I am so enamored with some pieces of experimental or formally strange writing and art and so turned off by others. But as I continued to mentally catalogue works that were achieving something impossible through an unexpected form that came to feel essential, like the only form in which that particular work could possibly have existed, I also developed a sharper eye for when a formal quirk felt externally imposed, inessential, and therefore annoying. If a story can be told in a straightforward way, a complicated inside-out spiral structure is going to feel fussy and tiresome. But a story that can only be told as an inside-out spiral finding that form is the transcendence we’re all chasing as artists and readers and viewers.

Letting innovations evolve naturally out of necessity requires more patience and trust in one’s own art, I think, than starting with an artifice and attempting to fill it with substance. But it’s so much more rewarding.

Attuning myself to this distinction in my own work has turned the way I approach challenging ideas on its head. Now, when I find myself stumped, feeling like I’ve set myself an impossible task, that’s when I feel most excited by what’s to come. Now I lean straight into the impossibility, excited for where it might take me, and grateful for every example I’ve encountered of artists achieving the impossible by inventing new ways forward. And next time I feel overwhelmed, or like this next impossibility might be truly impossible, I’m going to remember that I saw three and more tessellated Sarah Snooks on stage all at once, performing together in real time.