Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde

In April 1895 Oscar Wilde brought a libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his youthful lover, who had publicly maligned him as a sodomite. In doing so, England's reigning man of letters set in motion a series of events that would culminate in his ruin and imprisonment. For within a year the bewildered Wilde himself was on trial for acts of "gross indecency" and - implicity - for a vision of art that outraged Victorian propriety. In this work of the theater - a smash hit Off Broadway - Moises Kaufman turns the trials of Oscar Wilde into a riveting human and intellectual drama. Expertly interweaving courtroom testimony with excerpts from Wilde's writings and the words of his contemporaries, Gross Indecency unveils its subject in all his genius and human frailty, his age in all its complacency and repression.


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