About five minutes into “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” the stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel, the actress Sarah Snook, playing the louche aristocrat Lord Henry Wotton, reaches out and rests a hand on Dorian Gray’s shoulder. At nearly every performance, the audience gasps. Sometimes, from sheer delight, they giggle.
The gesture itself is simple, but the execution is so demanding that two years ago, when Snook first tried it, she had a panic attack. Snook plays both Lord Henry and Dorian Gray — and two dozen other characters, too. So she is putting her own hand on her own shoulder by way of an elaborate synthesis of live action, live video and recorded video. “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a Victorian Gothic trifle, can now be seen in portrait mode.
Even after a celebrated London run and weeks of performances at the Music Box Theater on Broadway, that moment, in which a recorded Lord Henry joins a live Dorian onscreen, hasn’t become any easier. As it approaches, Snook said she will find herself thinking: What if I’m a millimeter off? What if the magic is spoiled? The recording doesn’t protect her from imprecision, from accident. “The thing is,” she said, “it’s live theater.”
Kip Williams, the director of “Dorian Gray” and until recently the artistic director of the Sydney Theater Company, pioneered this technique, which he calls cinetheater, about a decade ago. Rehearsing a production of Tennessee Williams’s “Summer and Smoke,” he decided to stage a chase sequence in the bowels of the theater. Some colleagues encouraged him to record it, but Williams resisted.
“Theater is a live art form,” he said. “The audience knows when it’s live and when it’s not. That transiency, that temporal quality of being in the present moment is at its core.”
He perfected the technique in productions of macabre dramas like “Dracula” and “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” His rule was always the same. He would use live video only, never recorded. Then in 2020, he began work on “Dorian Gray” and that rule changed.
Williams was struck by an observation Wilde had made in a letter: that Lord Henry is how the world sees him; that Basil Hallward, the artist who paints Dorian’s portrait, is how he sees himself; and that Dorian is the person he aspires to be. So how fitting, he thought, to have all of those characters — and more — played by the same actor. (He was also inspired by a Michel Gondry music video in which multiple Kylie Minogues cavort amid a town square.) As he developed the piece in collaboration with Eryn Jean Norvill, who originated the roles, Williams soon realized that only recorded video would allow him to realize this idea of the multiplicity within any individual. “It was a terrifying breaking of my fundamental rule,” he said.
Snook (“Succession”) joined the production in 2023, in preparation for its London run. “This play is close to me as a person and an actor, the irony being that there’s 26 different characters in there,” she said.
Rehearsals were strenuous, not least because Snook had recently given birth to her daughter and she wasn’t sleeping much. She described shooting the recorded sequences, including that first one, as one of the hardest experiences of her career. In addition to delivering her lines with conviction, in costume and wig, with differentiated gesture and voice, she also had to remember elaborate choreography of where to look and when to move and speak, so that the video, designed by David Bergman, might eventually sync with the live image.
“The pressure of that was a lot,” she said.
I first saw the payoff of that pressure in a Times Square rehearsal room in late February. Snook, dressed in athleisure, stood on a makeshift stage. Five camera operators surrounded her, two with Steadicams strapped to their torsos, three manipulating cameras on tripods. These same operators handed Snook props — a cigarette, a paintbrush — as she morphed from one character to another, purring Wildean aphorisms.
“Go, camera five,” a stage manager murmured into a headset. “Go, camera one.”
On monitors in front of Williams and his colleagues, this live video was merged with the recorded sequences. The floor was dotted with dozens of pieces of colored tape, delineating precisely where Snook would have to stand so that the image of the shoulder touch would make sense. If she were off by even a millimeter, the moment in which Lord Henry seduces Dorian into a life of pleasure wouldn’t read.
“It’s practice, practice, practice,” Williams said. “It’s all about hard groundwork.”
Two weeks later, the show was in previews at the Music Box Theater. Here, Snook was joined onstage not only by the camera operators and crew members responsible for pulling cables out of the way and adjusting camera lights, but also a patchwork of screens large and small. Sometimes she stood or sat in front of them, sometimes they concealed her from the audience. Offstage, a focus puller, a vision switcher and a video supervisor helped to coordinate the images.
For Benjamin Sheen, a camera operator who has been with the production since 2020, these moments of integrated live and recorded video still feel perilous. “It’s a constant dance and juggling act,” he said. Sometimes he has mere seconds to scoot a camera into position, moving in unison with Snook’s rhythms. “If anything is even slightly off the illusion is broken,” he said. “So that’s very stressful.” He described that moment of the shoulder touch, and the moments after, in which Lord Henry and Dorian are joined by a recorded Basil Hallward, as “insanely risky.” Sometimes, he’ll help Snook out, gesturing with a finger so that she can adjust her stance or her shirt cuff.
Some nights there are glitches, and in those moments Snook is free to acknowledge the audience until the problem is remedied. Certain sequences, like an opium den scene, filmed under the stage on smartphones is, Sheen said, “absolutely rife with possibility for disaster.” (A filter will malfunction, a double tap will flip the camera, the Wi-Fi will cut out.) There are also intentional glitches in which a live Dorian and a recorded one conflict, the better to explore the work’s theme of what constitutes an authentic self.
Onstage, the screens become a new kind of canvas, suggesting the ways in which even the most distorting filters can lay our anxieties and desires bare. To see it, and to see Snook in her various guises, is to be forced to reflect on how we all present ourselves onscreen — cropped, edited and curated to within an inch of our lives.
“It’s about concealing and revealing, putting on masks, taking off masks,” Snook said of the production. “It’s about having your soul be seen.” This was part of why Williams had wanted to cast Snook. “Her capacity to unmask herself is incredible,” he said of her work in “Dorian Gray.”
Even amid the insane precision that the cameras demand, Snook finds moments to play and explore. “There are spaces where it is really specific and technical,” Snook said. “And then there are spaces for not necessarily improv, unless something really does go wildly wrong, but spaces for discovery and freedom.”
The making of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” was intense, rigorous and then some. But at the core of it, beyond the cameras and the screens, the production is for Snook every night, a place to pretend, avidly, which is why she became an actor in the first place. Playing all these characters, in whatever medium, reminded her of herself as a child, before smartphones, romping around her bedroom.
“It’s like the most bananas version of a kid miming to their favorite song,” she said. “They’ve got the hairbrush in their hand and they’re just doing all the words.”
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media. More about Alexis Soloski
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