An Interview with Kip Williams

The Director of "The Picture of Dorian Gray" talks about the limits of technology in live art, gender expression, and what Tiktok is really doing to our 'authentic self'

Once in a while, you come into contact with a piece of art that you just get. It articulates everything you’ve felt but been unable to explain while pushing your own understand of your self and the world you live in. Last March, Kip William’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” became one of those rare moments for me.

Williams’s reimagining uses one actor, many screens, and a cast of camera-carrying stage hands to bring to life Oscar Wilde’s famous novel about the dangers of a hedonistic life. Star Sarah Snook performs non-stop for two hours embodying each character with different outfits, affects, accents and with the help of her prerecorded self acting out the roles from the other side of our performance’s space/time continuum. The large screens where she is projected either live, prerecorded, or sometimes with a mix of both, physically move across the stage, change aspect ratio, and switch perspectives. Sometimes the screen is showing you what Dorian is seeing, sometimes it offer’s another characters perspective. But the use of screens brings the realities of a phone and media obsessed 2025 to a 135 year old story. The technology explores questions of how our new medias have impacted man’s natural instinct for self-preservation and self-aggrandizement in the eyes of others. I was able to ask Kip about the themes and techniques of his play this June.

This text has been taken almost wholly from the original video interview that can be found on youtube.

Claire: I saw you first read “Dorian Gray” in high school, what led you back to

The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Kip: About seven years ago, I came back and read a whole host of Gothic texts, in part because I was fascinated with that period of literature and the way that the writers of that time period wrote these extraordinary kind of allegorical tales that are fecund for reinterpretation, and particularly because it's a time in which those artists are grappling with a host of questions that I think are having their apotheosis in the times in which we're living. And when I read Dorian, I was deeply struck by how prophetic it felt. It really felt like he was writing about today in this world that's obsessed with beauty and youth and material gain, but also a world that is acutely aware of the ask that it places on people to perform their identity. I don't think Wilde could have foreseen how prolific that active performance would become in the manifestation of the mobile phone and social media. But he knew that we were spiraling towards this world of solipsism and narcissism. So when I read the story, I was like, Well, this is the tale to to explore those ideas and and the questions that come from them.

Claire: And the use of technology in the pre recordings, how did you envision that? How did it come together? Did you just see it all at once in your head?

Kip: I read it and immediately conceived of a production that would be one performer playing all of the roles; that there would be video in this very particular relationship to camera being the the manifestation of both audience and the portrait watching the performer and Dorian. I saw a number of sequences off the bat, like dinner party and the club sequence using face filters and even the kind of open Brechtian language of change camera, simple proper gesture change character. I was terrified by that vision because it was breaking my number one rule as a director who had used video for about five years in my practice at that point, which was that all of the video has to be live, there's to be no pre-record. And I knew that this particular conception would involve pre-record, so I sort of put the idea at the very back of my brain and said, Don't do this. This is too scary. But it persisted and niggled and became an idea that I had to pursue. And that's sort of when you know that it's in it, where it becomes undeniable in your mind.

Claire: In terms of the choreography of it, how many of the decisions are you able to preconceive, versus how much are you there with the head of tech and with Sarah Snook figuring it out live, beat by beat?

Kip: In Dorian, I came in with a very clear concept for how each scene was going to work. And in some instances, say, the dinner party: that's pretty straightforward in terms of how I see it. It's like, well, it's going to be a one to one ratio. I know how the camera is going to have to operate in order to shoot, etc. Instances like the opening chapter, the first half of that was very clear in my head. Sort of story boarded, you could say. But then once the performer leaves the chair, I work very quickly to choreograph and block the camera, and that's something that I do. So in that sense, there's this sort of really appropriately Wildean paradox between very high preconception considered rigor, and then wanting to be alive to the truth that's being generated by the actor, and then very quickly, I make a decision about where the camera is going to go in response to that.

Claire: I feel like the pre-recorded works so well with the themes of Dorian Gray. I watched it in previews, and then I came back a month or two later with my in laws and saw it again with them. And I was struck by this idea of like, oh, Sarah has aged, but her pre-recordings haven't. But where do you think the limit is with being able to use technology and pre-recording and have it still be live theater? Do you a running philosophy on when it stops being truly live theater?

Kip: Yeah, I actually really do. I have two kind of strong guiding principles that inform all the work I make. These two principles, which are the theme that separates theater from other narrative art forms. And those two principles are, is that it takes place in space and it takes place in time. Film is a two dimensional narrative art form, and you can pause it, same with television. And the novel takes place in your mind, and again, you can pause it. But a piece of theater is a set temporal experience. So it's live. The thing that really defines theater from other narrative art forms is that it takes place in space, and so one of the things that drives my use of camera and screen is that it has a very deeply spatial relationship to both the performer and to the audience, and that the screens are deployed in a very kinetic way that has a dramaturgy to it that helps tell the stories. You know, I'm quite averse to using theater that uses screens in a way that is a sort of addendum of information, or sort of deploys that sort of notionally two dimensional cinematic version. You'll note in in Dorian, in other works of mine, the screens operate in a way where they're like a performer. They are. They are spatially acting and interacting with that performer and then dramaturgically impacting the spatial storytelling as well. So key moments, for example, big one is when Lord Henry comes to tell Dorian that that Sybil is dead, and you have the Live Performer Sarah on stage as this tiny figure dwarfed by this giant Lord Henry. And that spatial relationship of Lord Henry to performer and also to audience has the impact of dominating the space that that gives him that power and authority that is requisite in that moment of storytelling, that moment of influence and sophistry and manipulation. So those two principles that must be live and it must be spatially driven, drive everything I do, and particularly with this use of technology.

The reason why I was able to break my number one rule, is because it's always in tandem with the live experience. And in fact, the purest form of the Cine-theater that is expressed within Dorian are frames where you have Sarah live on stage, and you can see her juxtaposed with a screen where she is live within that screen and also pre recorded within the very same frame. They are technically extremely complex to render live every night, but we pull it off with the work of of Sarah and an amazing crew and an amazing team to make that happen. But it is the very liveness that sits at the center of those moments that pre record.

Claire: Thoughts on how this principle engages with AI?

Kip: With this question around AI, and technology and theater like Dorian is an interesting case in point, because I think for all its contemporary technology, it's fundamentally built upon a very analog, ancient form of storytelling, which is a single actor coming to an audience to tell you a story. That's a form of story telling as old as time itself, and that is the through line through the entire piece, you are live connected to Sarah, who is directly telling you that story, inviting your imagination into the story to make it real, much like having a parent or a grandparent read you a story where they're putting on all the voices, and the production starts and ends in that very stripped back breaking language, where, literally, its performer and audience were making the entire story world real. And I think that's what makes it work. It's connected to that ancient form. But I also think that we can have a lot of moral panic around the use of technology and art in general. And there is a central part of it which is deeply concerning and warranted, which is about actually having human being artists making the work. When it comes to the question of AI, but when it simply comes to the question of technology in general, I'm of the belief that human beings have used technology in live storytelling since the dawn of time. Used fire to create shadows and images. You know, we've always used technology. We always will use technology. I can find it ironic where people like, I just want to empty stage and an actor in a chair - literally Dorian starts that way. I make lots of theater that way. But also, do you realize that the lighting rig that's lighting that performer is using technology that didn't exist 20 years ago? We're using technology like the comms allow our stage managers to call the cues. We have to use it. We should incorporate it. And as long as it is staying true to the principles of the art form, that it's a temporary, contained art form, it's live, and that it's a spatially driven art form, then it will always have a place.

And if I can say one other thing in the longest answer, I had this great lunch the other day with a novelist who who was talking about the resistance that a lot of writers have to putting mobile phones into the novel. She was like it, obliterating and ignoring the presence of that technology in our lives, in the stories that we're telling, is is akin to writing stories in the age of airplanes, where we say that there's only like horse and buggies that are getting us around. It has transformed our lives. It has transformed how time and space work within all forms of narrative art. But to obliterate it and to say it doesn't exist, I think, is to deny a central part of human existence that's going on. And I think one of the things that's so thrilling about seeing audiences on Broadway respond to Dorian is that it's a story that's 135 years old, but utterly speaking to the way in which our lives are unfolding today, and how central this is to that existence.

Claire: What was so powerful about your play was the way that it felt so contemporary. I made a lot of people go and I told them read the book first, so that you can keep up. I think a lot of them felt shocked at how relevant the screens made it feel to their lives, even if the book had felt a bit Victorian to them. And also, I think the moving screens emphasized the live performance, because you're kind of on the edge of your seat the whole time, worried about how it's gonna be pulled off. Like that first time she’s in conflict with the narration, and life Sarah is interrupted by prerecorded Sarah about who gets to narrate it. She's live, synchronized against herself on screen. You have this feeling of like, what if she trips? What if she coughs? Technically, what kind of room for error is there?

Kip: In a another appropriate Wildean paradox, there is very little room for error, but there's also a lot of room for error because it is all happening live. And it would sort of die if it wasn't live. Do you know what I mean? In a piece that is all about the oscillation between artifice and reality, between the truth of who we are, the whole thing is motored by constantly juxtaposing the artifice, the construction, with the illusion on the screen. So it has to be motored and motivated by that potential for the artifice to unravel. Otherwise, the whole conceit of the piece doesn't work. And I love that element about it, because there's sort of two things that come from it. In the room of human error within it, is that almost Vaudevillian or circus like tightrope walk energy that you cannot get from any other art form other than live theater. And it generates a sort of presence within the audience that is sort of unmatched, I think, in any other art form. And then the other element, and this is sort of, you know, speaks to one of the influences on the piece. One of the first things I showed to Sarah was Sally Potter's adaptation of Virginia Woolf's “Orlando,” the film that she made with them Tilda Swinton, where, as winter constantly breaks the fourth wall and looks into camera. Not only is that sort of the big generative inspiration point for the show's relationship to camera, sort of this very theatrical almost sort of Shakespearean aside notion of a complicit relationship between performer and audience, it also speaks to the subversive queer Oscar Wilde spirit of the piece where Sarah is encouraged to make that connection to the audience. You are brought inside the production by the wink of the eye. You are constantly having the artifice punctured for you and showing that it's not real. If anything does go awry. there was a rule within the piece that Sarah can talk to the audience, she can ad lib a joke about any mishap that may happen. And it's that acknowledgement of the construction that I think, not only speaks to the themes, but that underscores that this incredibly, technically complex work that's filled with a myriad of details is also a living, breathing, theatrical organism. And you know that the audience is witnessing it come to life in that very moment.

Claire: The first time I read Dorian Gray, I found it to be mostly about the dangers of pursuing beauty, the hedonism. I think what your show brought alive for me was this secondary danger, of the danger of influence. I'm on Tiktok a lot. I was very struck by the use of the word influence. And specifically this quote: “There's no such thing as a good influence, because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such a thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of the part that has not been written for him.” When I saw the play there was a Tiktok conversation going on about “are influencers boring”, and so I had this laugh about the question of influencers, and what happens when you're watching some girl from the West Village drink Matcha, and I'm like, we were warned. We were warned 130 years ago. That's actually a quite boring thing to do, to be watching other people live their life and trying to live like them. And I think something that your play did for me is it took Dorian Gray from being this idea of the duality of him and his portrait, to kind of almost the multiplicity of selves. Literally, the actor playing Dorian Gray is playing all of the influences upon Dorian Gray in this way you're seeing them codified on the screens as these externalized versions of who you've become, and how that kind of chips away at your soul. I know that this is a theme that you're interested in. I was reading about how you took one monolog and spread it over 20 people. I know you're doing Dracula next, and then Jekyll and Hyde, which is the ultimate two sided story. I'm interested in what you think about the differene in themes between ‘the two’ and ‘the many?’

Kip: What you've said is really gratifying and thrilling to hear, because it's a lot of how I relate to the piece as well. The technology deployed is central to achieving that, not only in this sort of technical sense in that it permits this splitting of the individual formally, but as we talked about the way in which it reflects how we are splitting ourselves today. Wilde talks about the three central characters being these three different iterations of his own self, that Lord Henry is who he is thought of as being, that Dorian is who he fantasizes about being, and that Basil the Painter, is who he probably actually is - his vulnerable self. Just simply that that triptych is that notion of the multiple self and the challenge we face as human beings to live authentically. And I think a lot of queer people are very attenuated to this. And certainly I am myself. There's contexts in which you feel you have to conceal a part of yourself in order to survive and protect yourself. And so as a result, you get very good at reading the way in which people are doing that in the world, but we do it in all manner of complex, nuanced ways. To your point about technology, what's so interesting is that this, this age of like performing identity, is not new. It that's an essential human phenomenon. We have to do it in order to express ourselves to other people. But we've never had to do it in a virtual space until quite recently, and we've never had to do it so prolifically and regularly as we are doing it today, as a result of the mobile phone and social media, and the challenge that is confronted to us outside of the innate human challenge of expressing, navigating the multiple selves in the real world, is doing that in a virtual space where it is predisposed to simple narratives, where it is predisposed to curation, where it’s predisposed to presenting a the airbrushed version of self. And I think there’s an odd feedback loop that then happens where the performed virtual self becomes the person who we feel we need to be real life as well, like damaging echo chamber and hall of mirrors that we end up living within, which is very much what happens to Dorian by the end of the piece, and is expressed visually in the production with the perpetual splitting of Dorian at the end of the sort of tragic, inescapable house of mirrors that that Dorian ends up in.

And this question of influence is a great question. I have not been asked very much about this in the process of making this work. It's a really exciting theme to to delve into, because, part of the influence as play are the proliferation of external sources of information that we are living with today. And there's great virtues to that, I am not just a purely anti social media, anti mobile phone, human being by any stretch of imagination. It has allowed disparate minorities to coalesce in a virtual space and be heard. But they’re platforms that are predisposed to simplify complex truth. It's not a platform of complexity. It's not a platform of nuance. So the influences that we get are often homogenized and they're mixing within this milieu of the curated self, rather than the complex self. And I do worry about that. But it goes back to Wilde. One of Wilde's influences on the novel is the Faust Mephistopheles myth. And obviously, Lord Henry is the sort of Mephistopheles figure within the piece.

But that that question of influence, I think, is really interesting, because we want to eschew responsibility for our actions. We want to say it wasn't me, particularly in the age of narcissism that we're living within. And narcissism is innate part of all human beings, to an extent, but it's being blown out of the water right now in our life. And part of that is an issue of responsibility, of moral responsibility, and we wish to sort of externalize that and say it's not me, or I was told, or so on and so forth. Like one of the things that's specific in this adaptation, more pointed is the choice Dorian faces a third of the way through the story between philosophy of authenticity and complexity and grayness that Sybil Vane offers, and philosophy of self service of solipsism that Henry offers. And Dorian ultimately chooses Henry, and he doesn't have to and yes, he gets gaslit by Henry, and yes, he is manipulated by Henry and pressured by Henry. And the piece looks at the damage that such relationships can have upon your life. But ultimately, I think Wilde says that you may be able to fool everyone around you, from taking moral responsibility for your actions, but you cannot escape your own self. Your portrait in your attic will know what you have done , you’ll always be accountable to that truth of what you know you've done. And I kind of love that as a relatively objective moral provocation to grapple with in 2025 in this time where our very notion of what's true has been so upended by various politicians and a kind of radical rewiring of how human beings communicate with each other, which has led to this proliferation of misinformation and sophistry in our lives. I love that 130 years ago, Wilde, very honestly, confronted his own morality and said, at the end of the day, you are morally accountable to yourself, and you cannot escape that truth. And I love that.

Claire: I find that to be really hopeful, a really optimistic take. I look at cancel culture and things online, and I feel like we're all living in this world right now, of fear that the other side won't be held accountable. There's such a feeling of looking at someone like Trump and wondering, does he have a portrait? Will there ever be that moment of anagnoresis where he wakes up, and goes, “I've been wrong”? It's a beautiful idea that one day everyone will feel guilty for what they deserve to feel guilty for.

Kip: Yeah, Dorian starts as this, sort of beautiful, naive, open soul, you know, I think what Basil falls in love with is equal parts. You know, obviously, Basil's deeply physically attracted to Darian, but he's also he falls in love with this sort of light that he says he has. There is this openness and it is tragic that the naivety of Darian leads him to be so vulnerable to. the manipulation of Henry. I think that's really clear within the story, but that’s in one narrative layer, if you look at it more complexly, in how Wilde saw the story and how this production sees the story as Henry being another function of the mind of the same being. Which you physically experience in the production. When you see Sarah playing both roles, same person talking to themselves, if you read the narrative as that psychological dialog that's at play in one person's mind, it does something different to how we all can navigate more complexly, our relationship to our own actions. Because we all have the Henry in our mind that says, “it wasn't your fault. Sybil Vane, she's just an actress. She's as much just a character as the people she was playing on stage. Don't worry about it.” It becomes, I think, more psychologically interesting when you do read the story as the characters being different facets of the one being, and how internally, that question of how we're going to live, who we're going to be, and the responsibility we're gonna take for what we do.

Claire: I think something unique to now, we've always been performing different versions of ourselves. You never treated your mom the same way you treated your boyfriend, but for the first time, we all have this ability to confront the artifice. And I don't know if you've ever experienced putting out a video and then having to watch yourself later and be like, I fucking hate that, but, I sometimes scroll through my phone and hear my own voice, and think, Who is that whiny, awful person? I think the show captures the fact that we, right now, because of technology, are actually having to look at and be forced to remember who we were pretending to be. Having to see something you posted a few years ago and be like, “No, I didn't. I was never that corny. I was never that hack.” It's a this brings new horror.

Kip: I love that you point out this sort of past relationship to self as well, because the notion of the human being this sort of static form that doesn't evolve, it's this sort of like very 20th century, almost sort of Chekhovian, patriarchal notion of how the psyche works. An almost Stanislavskian idea of the unity of interior design, exterior action. That is not how human beings work. We not only want, like 50 things at any one point in time, but often those things completely contradict each other, and they will change. And who you are 10 years ago will, I hope, be different from who you are today. We're so confronted. We're not only having to perform. We're confronted with our own performance in a way. So we're sort of like directing ourselves and giving ourselves notes in this insanely nuanced way. I love your analogy of you talk to your mother differently from how you talk to your boyfriend. You have a different energy when you hang out with your friends who you grew up with when you're five years old, from your friends who you've met at work, you know? And that is not being inauthentic. That's being human being. That is the beautiful dance of of the complex selves that that exist within us, but this information that we have to perform in the abstract space, but we have to watch it as well and be so hyper aware of it. I worry about that. The beauty of theater is that it asks 1000 strangers to come into a dark room and to collectively do something together. You bring 1000 people into a film, and you press play on that film, that film is not going to be changed by whether 1000 people in that room are invested, focused, listening, if they all get up and left, that film still playing. the piece of theater only exists. It's an immensely abstract art form, even the most naturalistic piece of theater on stage that has a fully realized set is not real. You are like, 20 meters away from the street where you can hear the New York cop cars zooming past. It is not real! It is only made real by us all deciding to make it real. And I love that about theater because it's 1000 different people coming together who don't know each other, collectively, doing that together. And for me, the best pieces of theater make that imaginative leap as big as possible. That's where this direction starts. It's an empty space asks entirely for the audience imagination. But my point that I'm making is that we get so much more from in person interaction, like, I love what the internet's done. You know, we might not be able to be having this conversation if we didn't have zone. And I love that there's so many virtues from it, but it's there's, there's a balance that we need to strike within our lives, and the ability to be present and to be vulnerable in the in the space of another human being feels to be increasingly diminishing at an alarming rate. And I think the only path that leads to is am increasingly dehumanized way in which we communicate with each other. This in the most simple, crude, obvious way, the way people talk about each other online. They would never say that to someone's face. And it's because we're you in the presence of another human being, there is this innate acknowledgement of your own humanity and empathy that that is brought forth. The thing I find so tragic about Dorian is that he loses his empathy as a result of what the portrait offers him, an unchecked ego results in very dehumanized behavior towards other people.

Claire: Talking about what we allow beautiful people to do, my friend Ashley saw the play on Wednesday. She said all I could think a bout was a Johnny Depp, a Brad Pitt in the way we allow beautiful men to get away with anything, because we're like, well, but they're so charming. They're so attractive. And it was almost shocking to me to think of how literal of an example that is. You kind of think of Dorian Gray as almost a parody, but it's really not. Especially for boys, because I think, as a woman, I'm always aware of being a beautiful woman as a double edged sword. But then you see a beautiful man, and you're like, Well, that seems awesome. That seems like how you win the game scot free. I want to talk to you about what you've done with gender in your performance, because, of course, Dorian Gray … pretty gay in the in the grand scheme of things, and the choice to have a woman portray the characters. Did you always want it to be an actress? Why the decision to have a woman play these mostly male, very gay characters.

Kip: As a gay, queer person myself, one of the things I love about the novel is its queerness. It was part of my queer awakening reading this novel as a teenager, who was at a all boys school and had just performed in a production of “The Importance of Being Earnest”, where I played Cecily. So my whole portal into Oscar Wilde was through the experience of performing gender, and I wanted to play her for the truth of who she was, both her gendered experience and her experience as a human in this story about, again, the tension between truth and lies and authenticity and artifice. So that was an amazing portal through which to enter into Wilde's body of work. When it came to years later, turning Dorian into a piece of theater was an immediate instinctual choice. For me, it does about 70 things within the show, and so I'm always hesitant to completely say everything that it does, because I want audience members to have their own relationship to it. But the very first thing it does is completely foreground for the audience, this performance of gender in the piece. And we all perform gender irrespective of our gender identity. It's one of the central ways in which we communicate our identity to the world around us. And so the piece is a drag act and a very foregrounded one in the first third to half of the piece. So kind of two things are happening. There's this story where the characters are ostensibly male, although queer male characters, and Dorian, I think, has an element of being non binary, to my instinct when I read the piece, but for all intents and purposes, is read as male, who are having these queer attractions between them, but then you have in the theater mental layer a cisgendered woman performing these male characters, and so that the kind of performance of gender is made manifest in the theater making. Which foregrounds the way in which these queer male characters have to perform ideas of gender themselves. There's also some kind of, I find problematic behavior from Lord Henry, and some sexist and misogynist behavior that he espouses within the piece.

Claire: Something I was thinking about when I was preparing for this interview was the irony of how much they are telling Dorian Gray your number one value is your beauty, and then how mean they are to him for being like, “Oh, do you only like Sybil Vane because she's beautiful? She's not even talented.” I'm like, Why can't she just be a dumb idiot? Dorian is the dumbest idiot there is.

Kip: Right? The way in which Henry and Basil are dismissive of Cybil Vane’s talent is laden with this undercurrent of misogyny, as is sort of Henry’s initial assumption that she'll be of no worth to begin with. So having Sarah play those roles offers a critical perspective upon that particular gendered attitude inside the narrative itself. The thing that I'm most proud of is, obviously there is this grappling between the narrator character and Dorian that emerges over the course of the first half of the play as to who's getting to tell the story. First the narrator starts arguing with herself, and then she starts arguing with Dorian, and then by the time you hit the middle of the piece, which is sort of the time jump moment where we go jump 18 years in Dorian’s life, we aesthetically jump 135 years with the introduction of the mobile phone and the contemporary music and contemporary costumes. But at that moment, the narrator and Dorian, without the audience realizing it, allied with one another, they become the same person, and the narrator will not reveal themselves again until the very, very final moment of the show. And so at that moment, the piece shifts from a kind of interrogation of gender binary, by the drag act in the first half of the piece, o what I find to happen that I'm most proud of, particularly as a queer person, is that Dorian’s gender, in this illusion between the two is both male and female and non binary. And from that point, irrespective of your gender identity, audience members can find themselves within Dorian Gray. And all my work espouses a non binary philosophy on gender. It's how I view the world, and it's how I engage with gender. I think there are multiple gender experiences, and I firmly believe that, and express that within my work. It's a fascination of mine that I interrogate in the in the work that I make.

Claire: As a woman watching it, and I'm in the entertainment industry, I felt what she was able to do, and the 4k of looking at her of it all. I think we're in such an era of this idea of you are not optimizing and flattening and getting your face as tight and poreless as humanly possible, you don't even have a shot to prove your talent. Right now, more than ever, it's like you have to look a certain way before you're even allowed to showcase what you've been working on. To see Sarah with a fully movable face, just do this tour de force performance, it felt like such a fuck you to Hollywood and the standards that women are both forced to have, but also put on ourselves. It's easy to get wrapped up in, like, “oh, no, I'm getting Botox for the art.” She's doing more than anybody else right now. And it's not vain, her performance, she's incredibly, physical and she's moving and she's making funny faces. You see inside her nose at one point. It really sends home this message of how ridiculous our obsession with beauty is.

Kip: It is, it is. Sarah would never say this about herself, but she's also an incredibly beautiful human being. She completely lacks vanity in both life and her art. She's interested in in the ideas and full embodiment of the characters she has to play, which is one of the reasons why she's the genius artist that she is. And you know, the production is not in any way anti plastic surgery. All power to people. But it is definitely looking at the pressure behind that, the pressure of the beauty culture and unpacking the mask that it creates and acknowledges the role that it plays in that act of performance. It's really, really interesting to continue to put this narrative in front of audiences, and particularly in the center of the production, arrive them in that moment of being confronted with that part of what we're able to do today. It's fascinating to see how people respond.

Claire: It felt very effective. Like a real wake up call and kind of a fuck you to anything you're telling yourself about how much tightening you have to be constantly doing. But I have a certain moment in the play that I have to get. Can you shed light on the song break? I think I could sit down and kind of decode when Dorian face is in the flowers and you first see the blue glove of Lord Henry. Or even, I love when he's alone in the woods. And am I right in saying that's the only time he's unmediated by screens, and he's kind of reckoning with himself alone? But the song break felt truly like something I didn't see coming and I would love to hear the thinking behind it.

Kip: These sort of moments of theater magic that you identify: the hand on the shoulder and etc. They always correlate dramaturgically, at a point in time where Dorian is being seduced into a particular way of thinking. So the hand on the shoulder comes when Lord Henry plants the idea of pursue a life of youth and beauty and pleasure and self. So it correlates with that active seduction. The mood of “Gorgeous,” the lip sync I knew that I wanted when I was writing it and conceiving the direction of it. I knew I wanted there to be a lip sync there, and I wrote in the script “add a lip sync where Dorian cleans up the murder scene and ends up at the front door so he can create an alibi.” I'll describe what I think it does functionally before I tell you how I found that song. But functionally, what it does is, you know, he's just murdered Basil, his best friend, and he's done so in hot blood, heated exchange. It is the most morally corrupt action that he has enacted by quite a bit up until that point in the story. So there's an extent to which audience members would feel justified to say, Well, I disown you. I don't associate with you anymore. I don't have anything to do with you. And with the lip sync, within 90 seconds of him murdering his best friend, the audience is giving him a round of applause and cheering, and so he has seduced the audience right back into his pocket and is then able to take them into the next section of the piece, where it really starts to spiral and unravel.

Claire: I've had that feeling of being there, like we've just had such a climax, and it felt like this moment of, how do you diffuse the emotional tension without kind of bringing down the energy that you've just built with a full murder? But, I hadn't even picked up on that. He's a murderer that we love now. A dazzling little murderer.

Kip: The Audience screams with applause 90 seconds after he's murdered his best friend. So there's that sort of dramaturgical function to it. And look, there are the kind of, in terms of the emotional, psychological landscape of the piece, a couple other things it's doing. But in terms of the song, I was like, I don't know what that song is, and I've had some sort of nascent ideas. And I was like, one o'clock at night, and I had just finished doing some writing on the script, and I got into bed, and my partner was scrolling through Instagram, and he follows this amazing trans drag queen called Juno Birch, who does this sort of like, 60s, alien drag, and it's really cool. And she had these videos that he was watching, and at the top of one of them was the first, like, four chords or something of Gorgeous, like, not the singing or anything, but just the horns section. I was like, what is that piece of music? And I shazammed it, and it was “Gorgeous” from The Apple Tree. And I listened to it, and it's this 90 second song that lyrically perfectly sums up the unchecked ego and narcissism of Dorian Gray that is so out of control at that point in the in the narrative. And I was like, here we go.

Claire: Well, thank you so much. This has been just an amazing conversation. I really appreciate the time.

Kip: Thanks very much. Well, thank you for having me, and thank you for coming and seeing the show twice as well, and for your insights on it, it's amazing to talk with you about it. Thank you.