Playwright: Robert Kauzlaric, based on
the novel by Oscar Wilde
At: Lifeline Theatre, 6912 N. Glenwood
Phone: 773-761-4477; $30 ( $15 students, $25 seniors )
Runs through: Nov. 2
Talk all you want about how 40 is the new 20, and age is just a number. The truth is, aging sucks. Those aren't lines of character signifying wisdom, they're wrinkles. Gray isn't distinguished. It's depressing. As the song goes, it ain't pretty when the pretty leaves.
Of course, youth worship is hardly unique to the 21st century. Long before Botox, boy bands and the Disney-induced idolatry of 16-year-old pop tarts, Oscar Wilde had his pen on the very pulse of youth worship. Published in 1890, his gorgeously grotesque The Picture of Dorian Gray remains chilling and immediate.
With Robert Kauzlaric's adaptation of the macabre thriller, Lifeline Theatre retains all the Faustian horror, preternatural beauty and homoerotic insinuations that run through Wilde's text and subtext like rivers of blood and champagne. This is a story of evil in the guise of a perfect body and an angelic face. Wilde's barbed humor makes Picture all the more delectable. Fanged and fabulous, the epigrams fly as Wilde exposes ugliness and hypocrisy lurking behind the glossy scrim of morality.
Tampering with a masterpiece is a dicey business, but Kauzlaric and director Kevin Theis magnificently capture the letter and the spirit of Wilde's original. In a potent construct, the narrative unfolds through two generations of actors. We meet Dorian's urbane friends ( and obsessive worshippers ) as young men being viewed through a prism of memory recalled by their older selves.
The performances are uniformly marvelous, but off-Loop veteran Don Bender stands out: With close to a quarter century in the world of storefront theater, he's an actor who just keeps getting better as the years pile up. Ditto the ever-defiant Sean Sinitski, who plays the elder Lord Henry Wotton, the libertine who first shows Dorian the godless pleasures of unrestrained hedonism. Watch also for Kyle A. Gibson, utterly compelling as one of Dorian's all-too-disposable lovers. As the darkly shining center of the first rate ensemble, Nick Vidal is delicious as Dorian Gray. Blessed with golden good looks, he shifts from a waggish, loveable roué into a creature capable of appalling cruelty with the silky, cold-blooded ease.
As for the all-important magical portrait, artist Charles Athanas gives us an extraordinary prop that garishly decays each time Dorian's soul is scarred with a new sin. While it lacks the lurid, diseased detail of Ivan Albright's famed portrait on display in the Art Institute, Athanas' picture is nonetheless both shocking and creepy, with each trait intensified by Andrew Hansen's original music and sound design.
'The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it,' blithely notes one profligate in Dorian's dark orbit. Lifeline's production is one temptation that should not be resisted. On the verge of Halloween, this is a story rich in scares and smarts.