The Truth Has Many Faces

‘The truth,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “is rarely pure and never simple.”

That’s the epigram that prefaces the published version of Moises Kaufman’s play “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde.” And it’s also the artistic ethic that drives this highly acclaimed drama, which opens at the Mark Taper Forum on Thursday.

Hailed by the New York Times as “the must-see sleeper of the [1997] Off Off Broadway season,” the stylized, multilayered docudrama chronicles the precipitous decline of the famous playwright, who went from having two hit plays running at once in London’s West End--”The Importance of Being Earnest” and “The Ideal Husband”--to being the defendant in a series of late 19th century trials on morals charges that led quickly to his imprisonment and ruin.

Yet “Gross Indecency” is about much more than one man’s travails. Based on a range of often-contradictory primary source materials, the play is also a kaleidoscopic exploration of the role of art and the artist in society. It presents history not as a single authoritative narrative, but as a series of competing versions of the same story.

The multiple viewpoints are precisely the artist’s point. “As soon as I started reading, I realized there were as many versions of what had occurred as people who were involved in it,” explains the personable Kaufman, 34, during a rehearsal break conversation one recent afternoon. “Everyone who had been present told a slightly different story of what happened.

“When I was writing the play, I said ‘Well, I’ll just write things next to each other and later on I’ll find out who’s telling the truth,” he continues. “Of course, the more I worked this way, the more I realized that I was never going to be able to find that out. The point became how do I create a piece of theater that can encompass all of those different versions rather than homogenizing them, which is what people usually do with historical events.”

Naturally, it was an artistic choice to render his subject in this particular “Rashomon”-like way. Yet it was also a personal one, reflective of Kaufman’s own vantage point since moving to the United States from his native Venezuela 10 years ago.

“Because I’m Jewish and because I am gay and Latino and live in a society where I’m such an outsider, it has made me very aware of the structures that we create,” says Kaufman. “There is a sense in which truth is a very personal thing.

“The Orthodox Jewish community has very strong ideas of what’s right and what’s wrong. The gay community has a very strong idea of what’s right and what’s wrong. The Latino community has a very strong idea of what’s right and what’s wrong. This play is about realizing how we come up with those ideas.”

Born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, Kaufman, who is of Russian-Jewish descent, attended a yeshiva (an Orthodox Jewish school) through high school.

His early exposure to the performing arts came thanks to family trips to New York. As an adolescent, he also attended an international theater festival in Caracas, where he first saw the work of such theater and dance-theater luminaries as Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor, Peter Brook and Pina Bausch.

It was not until Kaufman entered college, however, that he actually began making theater. “I went to my first class at 9 o’clock in the morning, and it was accounting,” he recalls with a certain rue. “Then, when I finished that class, I went downstairs to the activity center and asked, ‘Is there a theater group here?’ ”

What he found was the Thespis Theater Ensemble, now recognized as one of Venezuela’s preeminent experimental companies. Kaufman joined the troupe as an actor and spent the next five years performing with it, including on tours of Latin America and Europe.

During that time, he also managed to complete his studies. “I graduated as a business major,” says Kaufman. “But by the end of that time, I realized that what I wanted to do was [theater].”

Perhaps inevitably, he also began to outgrow the group that had given him his start. “After those five years, I felt that what I really wanted to be doing was directing,” says Kaufman. “I felt that I couldn’t do that in that company.”

He left the company and moved to New York in 1987 to undertake graduate studies in theater.

“At that point, the Experimental Theatre Wing at New York University had a similar vocabulary to what I was working with. It was a logical next step for me to go there.”

His particular interest--at that point, and still today--is theatrical language and form. He cites as influences Grotowski, Kantor, Richard Foreman and others--all artists known for styles that either abjure, or go far beyond, the bounds of realism, toward meta-theater.

During the 2 1/2 years he spent at NYU, Kaufman explored the language of form even as he began to develop his own directorial style. Then, after his final NYU project--a production of Beckett’s “Endgame”--Kaufman decided to form a company.

Founded in 1983, the troupe was named the Tectonic Theater Project. “Tectonic is the art and science of structure,” says Kaufman. “We’re really interested in how to build theater pieces that really are about theater. Every work we do, we reexamine how to do that.”

As Tectonic’s artistic director, Kaufman staged works by writers as disparate as Tennessee Williams and Benjamin Britten. His first real New York acclaim, however, came with his 1994 production of German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz’s “The Nest,” which was nominated for an Obie.

Then, in 1995, he came upon the project that was to prove his true breakthrough. “Somebody gave me a book called ‘The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde.’ Ninety percent of that book was epigrams and jokes, things from the plays and books and novels--things that I had known. But the last 10 pages were trial transcripts.”

In those transcripts Kaufman found the beginnings of “Gross Indecency,” a title taken from the wording of the charges under which Wilde was tried and convicted. “There’s a moment in the trial when a lawyer is reading to [Wilde] from ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ and asking him to defend Dorian Gray in a court of law,” says Kaufman. “That event--the event of an artist in a court of law having to defend and justify his art--to me was astounding.”

The transcripts also resonated with other materials that were on Kaufman’s mind at the time. “I was also reading a book by [French philosopher Michel] Foucault, ‘The History of Sexuality.’ The prologue of that is an essay called ‘We Other Victorians,’ and it’s about how much of the way we relate to art, sexuality and gender comes directly from Victorian society. So here I had a document that really illuminated our relationship to all these things.”

The potent combination launched Kaufman on a quest for the full transcripts of Wilde’s trials--a search that culminated five months later in the basement of The Strand bookstore in Manhattan.

“I read the whole trial and was smitten immediately,” recalls Kaufman, who had never written a play before. “First, it was a really important event. Second, I started seeing Wilde’s responses about the nature and purpose of art and found myself discovering things that I had never thought of before. It led me to read all of his philosophical writings about art and his essays and lectures.”

The Wilde that Kaufman discovered was not only a playwright and wit, but also a philosopher of aesthetics. “What I got from reading Wilde is this very pure discourse about the thing that art can do that nothing else can do,” says Kaufman. “Therefore, when in the court he’s being asked ‘Is this moral or immoral?’ Wilde responds with a higher morality that is very inherent to art, rather than a religious morality, which is the morality under which he’s being questioned.”

Upon further reading, in biographies and other source materials, Kaufman also found himself faced with competing versions of the same historical events.

Fortunately, he found his solution in the process of creating the play. “As I was working on it, I was rehearsing it,” he says. “Until I decided I was going to leave [all the competing accounts] in. So I would go to the reading with the actors, and they would say ‘from this book’ and ‘from this book.’ All of a sudden it hit me, that’s exactly what it should be: that’s the form that this should take.”

Staged with a nine-man cast, the play employs a kind of Greek chorus of narrators who read from the various sources as the other actors enact the varying accounts. “The event that the play is is this group of actors trying to figure out what happened,” explains Kaufman. “It doesn’t pretend to say this is what happened, but that we’re a group of actors trying to figure out what happened.”

“Gross Indecency”--which now has productions running in New York and San Francisco, and is slated for stagings in a range of other cities, including London--began modestly. The first full production, which cost just $15,000, took place in the auditorium of the Greenwich House School in early 1997.

At first, the reviewers didn’t notice it. But in March 1997, its fate was changed overnight by a rave in the New York Times in which critic Ben Brantley called the production “absolutely gripping . . . written and directed with a scintillating style of its own by Moises Kaufman.” Other equally positive reviews followed in short order.

Business took off and Kaufman soon struck a deal with commercial producers Chase Mishkin and Leonard Soloway to move the show to the off-Broadway Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, where it reopened in June. The budget for the new staging was $400,000.

It was there that Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson saw the production and decided to bring it West. “It’s the artistry of the way he has structured it, the use of three trials to tell a complete story--not only of Wilde, but also about the nature of art, and [the question of] privacy and public life, which seems very appropriate right now,” he says. “He has done it with extraordinary grace and insight into the subtleties and subtext of the issue.”

There is even a certain historical logic to “Gross Indecency” finding a home at the Taper, as opposed to a commercial house. Insofar as “Gross Indecency” takes place in a kind of courtroom and is ostensibly concerned with a trial, it bears an obvious relation to other docudramas staged at the Taper in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including “In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer” and “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine.”

Yet “Gross Indecency” also transcends the genre of the trial play. “It subverts the form,” says Kaufman. “In a courtroom drama, usually you don’t have many voices. Usually there is one uber-writer, one person who has decided what happens. Here, the audience is placed in a situation to decide not only whether the character is right or wrong in the issue he’s being tried for, but it also points to how we construct stories, and hence how we construct truth.”

In that regard, the true spirit that hovers over this work is that of director-producer Erwin Piscator, who worked in Berlin in the 1920s, along with Bertolt Brecht and others.

Piscator--who effectively invented the docudrama style made popular in more recent years by Emily Mann, Anna Deavere Smith and others--aimed at engaging his audience politically. To do that, he used innovations in both form and content, including a strikingly presentational style and the interpolation of nondramatic texts.

“There is a line between Piscator-Brecht, Emily Mann and [myself],” says Kaufman, who also mentions Piscator and Brecht in the author’s note in the Vintage edition of “Gross Indecency.” “We are all children of the same people.”

The greatest inspiration, of course, remains Wilde himself. “What’s fascinating about Wilde is that he believes in the power of the individual,” says Kaufman. “Wilde was saying the true object of art is to elevate the human spirit, to make man or woman elevate themselves to the fullest. The great thing about art is not what it gives us, but what we become through it.”

* “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave. Opens Thursday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends March 29. $29-$37. (213) 628-2772.