In ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray,’ Sarah Snook Goes Digital

About 5 minutes into “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” the stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel, the actress Sarah Snook, enjoying the louche aristocrat Lord Henry Wotton, reaches out and rests a hand on Dorian Grey’s shoulder. At almost each efficiency, the viewers gasps. Generally, from sheer delight, they giggle.

The gesture itself is straightforward, however the execution is so demanding that two years in the past, when Snook first tried it, she had a panic assault. Snook performs each Lord Henry and Dorian Grey — and two dozen different characters, too. So she is placing her personal hand on her personal shoulder by the use of an elaborate synthesis of dwell motion, dwell 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 on the Music Field Theater on Broadway, that second, by which a recorded Lord Henry joins a dwell Dorian onscreen, hasn’t turn out to be any simpler. Because it approaches, Snook mentioned she’s going to discover herself considering: What if I’m a millimeter off? What if the magic is spoiled? The recording doesn’t shield her from imprecision, from accident. “The thing is,” she mentioned, “it’s live theater.”

Kip Williams, the director of “Dorian Gray” and till lately the creative director of the Sydney Theater Company, pioneered this method, which he calls cinetheater, a couple of decade in the past. Rehearsing a manufacturing of Tennessee Williams’s “Summer and Smoke,” he determined to stage a chase sequence within the bowels of the theater. Some colleagues inspired him to report it, however Williams resisted.

“Theater is a live art form,” he mentioned. “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 approach in productions of macabre dramas like “Dracula” and “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” His rule was all the time the identical. He would use dwell video solely, by no means recorded. Then in 2020, he started work on “Dorian Gray” and that rule modified.

Williams was struck by an commentary 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 particular person he aspires to be. So how becoming, he thought, to have all of these characters — and extra — performed by the identical actor. (He was additionally impressed by a Michel Gondry music video by which multiple Kylie Minogues cavort amid a city sq..) As he developed the piece in collaboration with Eryn Jean Norvill, who originated the roles, Williams quickly realized that solely recorded video would enable him to comprehend this concept of the multiplicity inside any particular person. “It was a terrifying breaking of my fundamental rule,” he mentioned.

Snook (“Succession”) joined the manufacturing 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 mentioned.

Rehearsals have been strenuous, not least as a result of Snook had lately given beginning to her daughter and she or he wasn’t sleeping a lot. She described capturing the recorded sequences, together with that first one, as one of many hardest experiences of her profession. Along with delivering her traces with conviction, in costume and wig, with differentiated gesture and voice, she additionally needed to keep in mind elaborate choreography of the place to look and when to maneuver and converse, in order that the video, designed by David Bergman, may finally sync with the dwell picture.

“The pressure of that was a lot,” she mentioned.

I first noticed the payoff of that stress in a Occasions Sq. rehearsal room in late February. Snook, wearing athleisure, stood on a makeshift stage. 5 digital camera operators surrounded her, two with Steadicams strapped to their torsos, three manipulating cameras on tripods. These similar operators handed Snook props — a cigarette, a paintbrush — as she morphed from one character to a different, purring Wildean aphorisms.

“Go, camera five,” a stage supervisor murmured right into a headset. “Go, camera one.”

On screens in entrance of Williams and his colleagues, this dwell video was merged with the recorded sequences. The ground was dotted with dozens of items of coloured tape, delineating exactly the place Snook must stand in order that the picture of the shoulder contact would make sense. If she have been off by even a millimeter, the second by which Lord Henry seduces Dorian into a lifetime of pleasure wouldn’t learn.

“It’s practice, practice, practice,” Williams mentioned. “It’s all about hard groundwork.”

Two weeks later, the present was in previews on the Music Field Theater. Right here, Snook was joined onstage not solely by the digital camera operators and crew members answerable for pulling cables out of the way in which and adjusting digital camera lights, but additionally a patchwork of screens giant and small. Generally she stood or sat in entrance of them, typically they hid her from the viewers. Offstage, a spotlight puller, a imaginative and prescient switcher and a video supervisor helped to coordinate the photographs.

For Benjamin Sheen, a digital camera operator who has been with the manufacturing since 2020, these moments of built-in dwell and recorded video nonetheless really feel perilous. “It’s a constant dance and juggling act,” he mentioned. Generally he has mere seconds to scoot a digital camera into place, shifting in unison with Snook’s rhythms. “If anything is even slightly off the illusion is broken,” he mentioned. “So that’s very stressful.” He described that second of the shoulder contact, and the moments after, by which Lord Henry and Dorian are joined by a recorded Basil Hallward, as “insanely risky.” Generally, he’ll assist Snook out, gesturing with a finger in order that she will be able to modify her stance or her shirt cuff.

Some nights there are glitches, and in these moments Snook is free to acknowledge the viewers till the issue is remedied. Sure sequences, like an opium den scene, filmed beneath the stage on smartphones is, Sheen mentioned, “absolutely rife with possibility for disaster.” (A filter will malfunction, a double faucet will flip the digital camera, the Wi-Fi will minimize out.) There are additionally intentional glitches by which a dwell Dorian and a recorded one battle, the higher to discover the work’s theme of what constitutes an genuine self.

Onstage, the screens turn out to be a brand new type of canvas, suggesting the methods by which even essentially the most distorting filters can lay our anxieties and wishes naked. To see it, and to see Snook in her numerous guises, is to be pressured to mirror on how all of us current ourselves onscreen — cropped, edited and curated to inside an inch of our lives.

“It’s about concealing and revealing, putting on masks, taking off masks,” Snook mentioned of the manufacturing. “It’s about having your soul be seen.” This was a part of why Williams had wished to solid Snook. “Her capacity to unmask herself is incredible,” he mentioned of her work in “Dorian Gray.”

Even amid the insane precision that the cameras demand, Snook finds moments to play and discover. “There are spaces where it is really specific and technical,” Snook mentioned. “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 after which some. However on the core of it, past the cameras and the screens, the manufacturing is for Snook each evening, a spot to faux, avidly, which is why she grew to become an actor within the first place. Taking part in all these characters, in no matter medium, reminded her of herself as a toddler, earlier than smartphones, romping round her bed room.

“It’s like the most bananas version of a kid miming to their favorite song,” she mentioned. “They’ve got the hairbrush in their hand and they’re just doing all the words.”