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October 1 - 31, 2010: "A Wilde October"
Lexington Ensemble Company proudly presents a CityShow production that celebrates the life and work of Oscar Wilde by presenting A WILDE OCTOBER featuring...
The Importance of Being Earnest, An Ideal Husband, and Wilde's poetic tragedy, Salomé.
Special Ticket Offer: AVAILABLE ONLY THROUGH SMARTTIX.com:
ALL Wednesday evening shows AND Saturday/Sunday matinees (including Salomé at 5 PM) are now 50% off for the remainder of the month. Further, there is a tri-pack on sale (through SmartTix only). One can purchase a package to see all 3 shows for a reduced price of $45.00. (Nominal service fees for SmartTix purchases.) Details, tickets and showtimes.
Who was Oscar Wilde?
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde – the celebrated and infamous poet, novelist, playwright, and witty social commentator – was born on October 16, 1854 to an intellectually prominent family in Dublin. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and then Magdalen College, Oxford, attaining prodigious academic success, and winning high honors and the Newgate Prize for Poetry. During this schooling, he started to develop certain attitudes and philosophies in both his personal and intellectual life, including contempt for traditional Victorian values. He began to follow aestheticism – a movement that promoted the idea of art, for the sake of art and beauty alone. During this time, he also developed a reputation as a flamboyant and foppish dresser, with the ever-present flower in his lapel.
After a brilliantly triumphant performance in college, Wilde settled in London in 1878, where he moved in social circles that included the likes of the young William Butler Yeats. From 1882 to 1884, he toured the United States, England, and Ireland, giving lectures on Aestheticism; in the United States, he met some of the great contemporary literary figures such as Walt Whitman and Oliver Wendell Holmes. His first play, Vera, was staged in New York but did poorly and had a short run. Wilde married Constance Lloyd in 1884, with whom he had two sons, and in the late 1880’s, wrote reviews, edited a woman’s magazine, and published a volume of poetry and children’s stories. In 1891, Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was published and attacked as immoral and scandalous. In fact, the work was deeply personal and portrayed the author’s internal battles, lamenting that “ugliness is the only reality.” It was in this year that he also met Lord Alfred Douglas, who would eventually become his lover and ultimate downfall.
Over the next few years, Wilde wrote and produced a string of successful plays: Lady Windmere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), and An Ideal Husband & The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Wilde completed the one-act tragedy, Salomé (written in French), in 1892, but was unable to produce it at the time due to a law that prohibited the depiction of biblical characters for theatre. By 1895, Wilde was enormously popular and adored by London society. This popularity was short-lived, however; later in the same year, during the concurrent runs of his plays An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, he became the subject of a homosexual scandal that led him to withdraw from all theatre engagements and declare bankruptcy. Wilde was ultimately prosecuted criminally and found guilty. He spent two years in prison performing hard labor, and then the remainder of his life in obscurity on the European continent. He died penniless in Paris of cerebral meningitis on November 30, 1900, and is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
George Bernard Shaw referred to Oscar Wilde as “our most thorough playwright” adding, “He plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the whole theatre.” More than a century after his death, his plays still make audiences laugh and Wilde remains widely known because his work, like Shakespeare’s, continues to be studied and performed regularly.