Gross Indecency

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"Thrilling...unforgettable, maybe even life-changing...it has the inevitablity and much of the monumentality of a Greek tragedy" (USA today)

In 1895 Oscar Wilde brought a libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry for publicly maligning him as a sodomite, thus setting in motion a chain of events which culminated in Wilde's own conviction and imprisonment for gross indecency. Weaving together original courtroom transcripts with writings by Wilde and his contemporaries, Gross Indecency charts the tragic downfall of the most sophisticated man of Victorian letters at the hands of a society that was itself outwardly elegant and adventurous, yet inwardly deeply repressive and vindictive.

"Kaufman has dramatized Wilde's fall with the sort of rapier stylization that Wilde himself would have admired." (Time)

Author Bio

Moises Kaufman is a playwright, director and founder of Tectonic Theater Project. His Gross Indecency was created in New York, where it played to sell-out houses for over a year and a half. He has also directed the play in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Great Britain. For Gross Indecency he received the Lucille Lortel and Outer Critics Circle Awards for Best Play, the Stage Directors and Choreographers' Foundation 1996-97 Joe Calloway award for excellence in the craft of direction, the GLAAD Media Award and the Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Outstanding Achievement Award. He is the founder and artistic director of New York City's Tectonic Theatre Project. With Tectonic he has directed works by Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, Benjamin Britten, Sophie Treadwell, Robert Ashley and Peter Golub. His direction of Franz Xaver Kroetz's The Nest was named 'one of the ten best productions of the 1994-95 season by The Village Voice. In 1993, a retrospective of his work was presented at the Consulate General of Venezuela in New York. In his native Venezuela, Kaufman performed as an actor with the Thespis Theatre Ensemble, one of the country's foremost experimental theatre companies. He has lived in New York City since 1987.