Oscar Wilde was badass. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, pissed off the British literati so much they deemed it immoral and later used it as evidence in an indecency trial. As a result, Wilde spent two years in Reading Gaol, a jail in Reading, Berkshire, about which he wrote one of his final poems, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” In it he succinctly restated the tragic core of his novel: “Each man kills the thing he loves/Yet each man does not die.”
Wilde was a great poet, but he wasn’t a mind-blowing tragedy writer. So while Alisa Stewart’s stage adaptation of his novel for Beaverton’s Experience Theatre Project is ambitious, it suffers when Wilde’s characters shift from believable people into poignant observation machines that serve only to move the play forward.