RJ

Entertainment

Two are breathing life

into a slice of Wilde

By Peter Bellamy

The theater requires all sorts and conditions of men its wonders to perform.

A prime example is "The Importance of Being Oscar," the one-man show about the tragic, enormously gifted Oscar Wilde, which opens tomorrow night at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival.

Portraying Wilde, the boundless wit and brilliant novelist, poet and playwright, is Vincent Dowling, the artistic director of GLSF, who once held a similar post at Dublin's famed Abbey Theater.

The director is Roger Hendricks Simon, a talented director of plays on both sides of the Atlantic, who in high school won an American Legion award only later to be arrested absurdly for desecrating the American flag.

The two have a relationship of mutual respect and affection, tinged with ironic humor.

The reason Dowling, an accomplished director, feels he needs a director in "The Importance of Being Oscar" is simple.

"An actor feels completely naked on stage,” he said. "A director protects and provides a spiritual cushion for him. Objectively, the director can see many things on stage not obvious to the actor.'

Simon's reasons for wishing to direct Dowling in the play are equally forthwright.

"The Irish believe in the spoken word and the play needs an Irish Zorba like Vincent, with his great joy of living and tolerance to dramatize a personality as gifted, compassionate and loving as Wilde.

"I hope that even those who have never heard of Wilde will realize that this is a play about freedom to be oneself, even if persecuted. I hope it will be a celebration of life and love and of Vincent Dowling.

A "Vincent's quotations from Wilde's great and moving poem, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol,' prove again that the artist reacts best when his back is to the wall.

"Neither Vincent nor I have ever seen the play and I'm glad, else we might have been frightened to do it. Vincent will be the first actor to do it since Michael Mac Liammoir, who wrote it in. 1960."

Mac Liammoir appeared in the play, by the way, at John Carroll University in 1961.

Simon lapsed into humor when asked how Dowling responds to direction.

"Any good actor rebels," he said. "Give VinScent direction and his eyes roll and there is a long pause. He then says 'I'll give it a try,' but does it

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in such a manner you know you shouldn't have suggested it."

Simon said that he had known Dowling "over a period of four days since 1968.

"I first met him after I'd seen him perform in 'Playboy of the Western World' at the Edinburgh Festival," he said. "I thought he showed promise and asked him to come to New York, but he didn't."

Dowling's explanation as to why he first saw Simon direct a play at the Edinburgh Festival was because "his theater's bar stayed open until 2:30 a.m., after my performance.'

Simon a graduate of Middlebury College and the Yale Drama School, later directed for Dowling at the Abbey Theater..

"I was later arrested for desecrating the American flag when I was acting in a play, 'Keep Tightly Closed and in a Cool, Dry Place,' the same play I'd directed in Edinburgh," he said.

"I was one of three actors arrested because a flag was used as a blanket in the play. It was embarrassing because my mother was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and I'd won the American Legion award.

"The Civil Liberties Union took a hand and we were put on a kind of parole."

In "The Importance of Being Oscar" Dowling will quote Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray," "Lady Windemere's Fan," "The Importance of Being Earnest," "An Ideal Husband," his poems and scintillating epigrams. He will play both male and female roles.

The trial of the bisexual Wilde for homosexual crimes will be presumed to have occured during the intermission.

Vincent Dowling (left) and director Roger Hendricks Simon.