I was an old man with a hat and a case, alone in UAN Florenc Central bus station in Prague, Czech Republic  -  a long way from home.  Orienting myself in a narrow slice of shadow out front as yellow busses bound for Karlovy Vary roared past, I sucked an e-cigarette and peered tentatively to the subway sign two hundred meters away.  It was impossibly bright and hot on the street.  In my case was a carefully composed text, a hand made costume and (gasp) a wig I had been forced to trim myself.  All told, several years of aesthetic decisions that I had arrived to the Prague Fringe Festival to put to the test.   I was traveling with a strange thing, a one-hour solo performance of Oscar Wilde that I was confident would hold.  The show was on its legs, ie I could get through the 3700 words in the allotted time without crashing, but I must yet transform myself to pull this off.  Ya, okay, like Whitman said, ‘I contain multitudes’, but the one who could stand up in a room of expectant strangers and summon this outsized persona was elusive and I had only a few hours to find him. 

 

By midday, the inexorable approach of the moment compelled me to Mala Strana to find my venue.  Prague in June was oppressively crowded,  the roiling masses scarfed mountains of dripping ice cream and humiliated themselves publicly for a never-ending selfie.  What on earth was I thinking?  I preferred to have  her soaring crenellations and un-bombed Baroque interiors to myself, in frigid January.  No matter, as I must needs focus on the details of my transformation, for the hour rapidly approaches.  I climbed the hill that led towards the cathedral.  I was ready,  I could do this.

You look different than the picture’ said the girl stationed in an event room of a hipster hotel.  

‘Yes, I am an actor,’ I replied tartly.  ‘Will you show me the stage, please?’  

She walked me from the windowless basement lobby past the toilet, past a fitness center, down a low corridor.  With sinking dread, I followed her cautiously down a blind, stone stairs to what was politely described as an ‘atmospheric’ cellar.  The floor of this…vault…was dangerously uneven, the rough stone walls cold and wet, the brick ceiling so low that I could not even use the top third of my movement range.  The stage, if you could call it that, was one meter deep.  I found the spot, the center of the space, where the light was, from where the energy flowed.  In the moment it takes to refract my head to a few possible, projectable angles, I intuited that the tech director’s message was correct, as a space to make theater for up to twenty people, this room would suffice.  So, the birth of my Oscar would happen somewhere in the earth under old town Prague.  You can’t get any lower than this, I thought, so it’s all up from here.

 

I rehearsed early evening on a picturesque island in the Moldau, near the calming loll of a willow tree.  Using my very breath to fashion his sentences, I spoke my text over the water, invigorating his thoughts and training my body to mimic the angles apparent in a 136 year old image.  My process was to focus on the myriad details of character until said character could speak for itself in my head, but Wilde was such an overwhelming persona, this challenge was beyond that.  I must presence Oscar Wilde in a room, an unmistakable style that my audience would arrive expecting to encounter.  The memorization of the text, no small task, was only the first and most necessary step.  The real question was Wilde’s studied nonchalance and how to deliver that quality for a public.  The timing of his famed ‘sprezzatura’ was a mystery,  there was no book or technique to find this.  I needed the tension of a public to feel my way to an effective delivery.  The audience’s listening would inform how to hold the comma, explode the clause, spit the consonant, smirk the retort.  It was mostly about not over playing, but all I could do was prepare for this moment in every way possible.

 

On my second day in Prague, I failed.  The opening event of the Festival was a Sunday afternoon ‘taster’ when every show was invited to climb onstage and present one minute so people could get a look at you.  I had agreed to appear, but I had a bad feeling about this.  I went early to suss out the vibe and my premonition was confirmed, the atmosphere was pure Fringe; beginners bravado, aggressive crowd control, no dressing area or backstage, actors in makeup were milling nervously about the lobby and crammed into the hallway to the toilet. The room was an open high ceilinged bar, loud and chaotic, with tourists gorging on a breakfast buffet while quaffing beer.  Sight lines and sound sucked, the hosts rude and officious, and I did not feel confident to put my still untested Oscar before these hardened consumers.  I went to my room and put on my costume, drank a beer and tried to persuade myself to walk down the street in a wig and velvet jacket to play at this event.  I could get my audience at this thing, or I could fall.  I coaxed myself gently for an hour, but I could not get myself to do it.  Crestfallen, I took off my costume.  I went to the event and it sucked, and I was glad I didn’t do it.  If I had known the atmosphere before, I might have found a way to play my Oscar successfully, but one should not throw pearls before swine. I had balked. 

 

In Prague, the rangy apartment dog ambled without leash on the pedestrian mall and sat presumptively on his owner’s lap in a boulevard cafe, inspecting passersby with a studious, canine air.   The Czechs were the people, old iconoclasts uniting with young students, who had the wherewithall to sluff off the colorless, corrupt Communist party without violence in ’89, and elect the cafe poet Vaclav Havel as their president.  ‘I’m not the president of the lies,’ he said.  ‘I’m the president of the truth.’  Czech sense of line and art is quite fine, Czech food is heavy and delicious, Czech boys are uniformly desirable, and I even have a famous friend in Prague, the successful contemporary mime artist Radim Vizvary.  He had not returned my message and I did not have the energy to chase him.

 

The story of Wilde’s sudden emergence in London as the brilliant author of ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray,’ and ’Lady Windermere’s Fan’ always seemed to me as curiously insufficient.  Recent revelatory research, made possible by the internet, culled hundreds of disparate sources to paint the swirling complexity of the popular, spectacle culture of 1880’s America, where Wilde made his lecture tour.  ‘Making Oscar Wilde,’ by Michèle Mendelssohn helped me to understand how Wilde, adored, ridiculed, burlesqued, and sinking under a sea of imitators, honed his ironic dandy night after night against the scornful gaze of the unruly American rabble.  Even more astonishing is Mendelssohn’s work around the then widely popular Minstrel Show and the clear structural connections between the smart talking ‘Interlocuter’ and Wilde’s aphorism spouting genteel English society characters.  My concept was that Wilde had found his groove in America during this little known lecture tour and further, in San Francisco, that most cosmopolitan of American cities was where the pieces came together for him.  My play was the story of Wilde creating himself.  My challenge was to evoke some of this complexity without becoming boring.

 

But it was the calm terror of uttering those first words into the space of that moldy vault that was the moment I’d paid for.  All those judgements I’d made over the years to get to this point would in this moment rise, or fall.  I know what to do at this instant, this is a social ritual I believe in and one that I am committed to completely.  That’s what it takes, and that is what my life looks like.  My play would go up, because that’s what I do. 

 ‘In asking you to build and decorate your houses more beautifully…’ said the actor who dared to pretend he was that towering figure of scandal.  The words resonated invitingly like a church bell on a Sunday morning, or a crow’s caw in a quiet field.  The assembled art patrons murmured in recognition and shifted their weight in their plastic Ikea chairs.  I seized the tension and floated it, adjusted attitude, body, and accent to waft it present and potent in the space.  That’s right, tonight you got the right ticket for the right show.  Sit back folks, and watch this actor work.  Oscar Wilde is in the house.