Gross Indecency (The three trials of Oscar Wilde)

The play

In 1895 OScar WIlde sued Marquess of Queensberry, who was his lover Lord Alfred’s father, for defamation. He had said publicly that Wilde was a sodomite. Everything ended up as an acussation to Wilde for committing acts of “gross indecency” and a condemnation to forced labor in the Reading Prison. In Gross Indecency, the author, Moises Kaufman, gathers the documents of the scandalous lawsuit, testimonies of the trial, personal letters, interviews, pieces of WIlde´s plays and the words of his own contemporaries to tell the story of the fall of the great man of letters.

In this play Wilde deploys all his brightness, his desperation and his public and last fail. Gross Indecency is a “legal tragedy” similar to the suit to Socrates  told by Plato. An amazing story in which the grewt seducer falls in front of the world that had been seduced by his own words.

Moises Kaufman (Author)

Born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1963. Playwright and directorfromed in NYU and co-founder of the “Tectonic Theater Project”, a company dedicated to examining the theatrical language as well as dealing with social contemporary issues. With this company, he created three plays that made him be in the new American theatrical esthetic world. Gross Indecency: The three trials of Oscar Wilde (1995), The Laramie Project (2001) and I Am Mw Own Wife (2002), being awarded the Maximun honor granted to an artist in the United States: The National Medal of the Arts, as nominations and prizes in the Tony Awards, Drama Desk Awards, outer Critics Circle Awards among others.