Wilde man

Ken Ruta brings Oscar to life

by Bill Rodriguez

Oscar Wilde, that witty and flamboyant Poster Boy for "Decadent" Behavior. How amusing.

Well, there was nothing funny about the few years left in Wilde's life after the gates to Reading Gaol clanged shut behind him for the second and perhaps most frightening time -- and sent him out into the world a pariah.

Oscar Wilde: Diversions and Delights, a one-man show written by John Gay and performed by Ken Ruta, will give you the details on Tuesday, April 27 at Rhode Island College. Quite appropriate for the man who said, "I like to do all the talking myself. It saves time and prevents arguments."

The happy-go-lucky title has to do with the premise: the year is 1899, the place Paris, and Wilde is giving an entertaining lecture to make a few francs to pay for his liquor bills. The next year he will die of complications of syphilis and an inner ear injury he received from a fall while in prison. The two years in jail were for "gross indecency," which was as explicit as the English court could be in proscribing homosexual activity. After his release, Wilde lasted only three more years before dying at age 46. His wife changed her name, his two adoring boys were never allowed to see him, and the man was shunned by a formerly adoring high society, who lionized himshortly before the scandal for The Importance of Being Earnest. (Being "earnest," by the way, was a wink-wink-nudge-nudge expression for being gay.)

"Dame Nellie Melba, who had wined and dined him when he was at the peak of his career. He spots her a block ahead of him. She spots him and runs down an alley to avoid meeting him. I guess that happened all the time. People didn't want to look at him, be near him," Ruta described. A veteran of American regional theater -- chosen by Tyrone Guthrie as one of the original members of his troupe, a mainstay at A.C.T. in San Francisco for 30 years -- the 62-year-old actor spoke from Phoenix, where he was directing a play.

By the end Wilde was wallowing in crying jags and maudlin reveries, absinthe having rotted his teeth if not his mind, although his celebrated ready witticisms could still surface. In his last hours, he did come up with the requisite deathbed quip: "This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has to go."

Wilde cultivated such a sense of public persona and image opportunity that he has been called the first performance artist. He wore foppish garb that makes Tom Wolfe's ice-cream suits look drab. And there are those aphorisms and bon mots he is famed for -- "Vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people," "Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes," "Work is the curse of the drinking classes," and, perhaps most tellingly, "Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others."

That acceptance of human frailty, in an age of hypocritical demands for ideal behavior, is what Ruta most admires about the man. "One of my favorite things -- it's in De Profundis -- is when he talks about the saint being the closest thing to the perfection, but he says that the sinner is the closest thing to the perfection of man. I rather think that's pretty marvelous. And it's certainly him -- I mean, what he went through at the end."

The actor contends that Wilde didn't identify himself as a homosexual, and certainly not as perverse, any more than did the intellectuals and aristocrats of ancient Greece and Rome. As one of the prominent litterateurs of the Aestheticism Movement, he valued beauty from whatever source. He believed that life should burn, as essayist Walter Pater expressed it, "with a bright, gemlike flame."

"He was always looking for that ideal, that Grecian ideal that was almost sexless," Ruta said.

So Wilde briefly took as a lover one of the young aristocratic aesthetes among his hangers on, Lord Alfred Douglas, nicknamed "Bosie." Unfortunately, the young man was the son of the influential Marquis of Queensbury, who at a men's club left an open note addressed to Wilde that accused him of homosexual behavior. Thinking himself innocent of any actual wickedness, Wilde took the astounding action of suing the marquis for libel! After two trials uncovered details -- and two brothel "rent boys" testified, perhaps falsely, against him -- it was Wilde who was imprisoned.

In recent post-Stonewall years, there have been several biographies and plays about Wilde. The most recent film was last year's Wilde, with Stephen Fry, which Ruta attended with some professional apprehension.

"I thought I was going to go to it and be jealous, but I wasn't. I thought the picture was a cop-out," he declared. "And putting Oscar in that lavender suit -- he never did anything that stupid. And there was a happy ending!

"I thought he was played as a victim," the actor added. "And he wasn't. He was doing these things willfully. He was an adventurer of the senses and wanted to try new things."

In 1977, Vincent Price was the first actor to do the one-man show, performing for two years in San Francisco. Twenty years later, Ruta reprised the endeavor, working for two years with its author, playwright John Gay, to update the text with various details and insights that had emerged in recent biographies and their own research, such as Wilde's close relationship with his two boys.

To create a physical presence, the actor relied on the many photographs of Wilde that exist.

"There are certain physical mannerisms that he maintained all through his life. The way he kept a silly pose of a hand at his hip, which was just odd," Ruta observed. "And reading what other people had said about him, saying that he was a clumsy man. He had difficulty moving -- he was big."

Ruta and Wilde are the same height and have the same tailor measurements.

Although the actor has played several turn-of-the-century literary figures, such as Shaw, Chekhov and C.S. Lewis, he had never done a one-man show before this one.

"Oh, it was scary at first," Ruta said, laughing lightly. "Because you've got no one else to blame it on. You're there all alone!"

Well, not quite. Between the appreciators of wit and the admirers of martyrs, Ruta's performance is likely to draw the kind of throng more typical of Wilde's pre-scandal heyday.