Sarah Snook is the only person onstage — besides some cloaked-in-black camera operators — in a whopping 26 roles for Broadway‘s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Director Kip Williams, the former director of the Sydney Theatre Company who brought the play from Australia to the West End and finally to New York, retrofits Oscar Wilde’s 1890 classic of vanity and decadence to a 2025 mindset and visual style. “Succession” Emmy winner Snook plays not only Dorian Gray, but the man who paints the portrait that dooms the dandyish flaneur to narcissistic doom. As well as 24 other people, men and women, in his midst.
“The Picture of Dorian Gray,” comprised of 60,000 words all memorized and monologued by Snook, is now at the Music Box Theatre through June 29, with the actress performing six shows a week in often grotesquely distorted close-up courtesy of cameras capturing her every move and displaying the various characters across panels on the stage.
“She did all 101 performances on the West End with no understudy and — touch wood — she was able to do the same on Broadway,” Williams told IndieWire from Australia over the phone when asked about the fact that, no, Snook does not have an understudy. “It’s one of those shows where it’s so complex, and it resides so specifically within that performer, that to have someone else do it, it’s an entirely different work of art.”
In Victorian England, the hedonistic Dorian Gray commissions a painted portrait from Lord Henry Wotton that the artist promises will age so that Dorian himself doesn’t have to. That, of course, doesn’t go to plan, as Dorian’s pursuit of eternal youth becomes the character’s undoing (and with a bender of Victorian debauchery and eventual murder along the way). Williams said it was always the idea for a woman to play Dorian, as Eryn Jean Norvill also played all 26 parts in Australia, but that he’d be open to casting another gender playing the character in future iterations.
“The drag act in this production of her playing these perceivably male roles creates not only an expression of the performance agenda, which is something that we all do irrespective of our gender identities, [but it] starts to create conversation around the way in which we perform gender,” Williams said. The play culminates with Snook in a blond pompadour, and in what almost resembles Elvis drag. “In terms of trans men and cisgendered men, either queer or otherwise, I would be open to that. It would just be different. And I’d want to remake it with that in mind because this is a piece about, at its core identity, [how] gender and sexuality are such central facets of our humanity.”
Williams was nominated on Thursday for a Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play, with “The Picture of Dorian Gray” also up for best actress Snook, scenic design (Marg Horwell and David Bergman craft memorable images that blend live theater with pre-recorded footage), costumes, lighting, and sound.
As for the pre-recorded footage, which finds Snook interacting with various versions of herself in ornate costume as well as a more stripped-down utilitarian look as a narrator, Williams said, “It was a radical breaking of my number one rule in using cameras on stage to deploy prerecord. Up until that point, I had monastically only ever used live footage on stage. And that for me ultimately is because theater is live, it’s transient, it takes place in the now, and then it’s gone. The more I read the book, the more it became impossible to deny that this was the way to realize this production. In doing so, [it] would be really, really true to Wilde’s exploration of the ways in which we perform multiple versions of ourselves and Wilde’s central philosophy that life is one grand act of theater in which we’re always performing an idea of ourselves.”
Also living monastically is Snook, who resides in Brooklyn, between performances. She does a matinee and an evening show on Saturdays, with additional runs Wednesday through Friday and Sunday.
“She sort of lives a semi-monklike existence whilst the show is on,” Williams said. “She eats very healthily. She’s exercising. She does extensive warmups and warm downs pre- and post-show. There’s no coffee, no alcohol, a lot of water. So there’s a very kind of strict regimen that she keeps. And when I came to cast Sarah, one of the things I knew about her was that she has this incredible work ethic and rigor, and I knew that she would embrace the sort of almost athletic task of performing this role.”
He added that he also “knew that she had an incredible set of technical gifts, including an extraordinary voice, and that operates on two levels. One, you are listening to her voice nonstop for two hours. So you need somebody who has a nice timbre of a voice you want to fall into. But at the same time, that voice needs to have an athletic technical strength to it that can do, in some cases, two hours, twice in one day, which Sarah does. An actor [in this role] needs to be chameleonic and their transformations have to have incredible comic chops and great psychological dexterity.”
“The Picture of Dorian Gray” also integrates social media and facetuning into this replica of Wilde’s vision. “It’s about the queer subverse spirit of this text [where] Wilde is constantly highlighting the artifice of social pretense and puncturing it and doing so with queer camp,” Williams said. It’s funny when we recognize that actually the pretenses that we all invisibly engage with are actually an artifice, are actually an act of performance… There is this incredibly dark and tragic portrait of an individual who has placed their own needs and their own desires above the betterment of all those around them, and is corrupted by that, is unraveled by that. And this story about narcissism and about unchecked ego feels like a story for 2025.”
Next up: “Dorian Gray” is part of a trilogy of one-person shows Williams is mounting, with the goal of bringing “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde” and “Dracula” adaptations from earlier Sydney Theatre Company runs to the Northern Hemisphere. “I’m also going to be directing a number of different shows up in London and New York over the next couple of years, which is exciting,” Williams said. “I’m developing my first feature film. So yeah, there’s a lot on the boil, which is great and so humbling to have that interest from audiences in these great theater cities in the work. Ultimately, why you do it, you do it for the audiences, and to have that ongoing conversation and dialogue with audiences over different productions as you talk to one another through the pieces.”
“The Picture of Dorian Gray” runs at Broadway’s Music Box Theatre through June 29.
