BWW Reviews: ShakesCar's PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY Schools Oscar Wilde's Playboy in Hollywood

It takes a special man with a special depth and sensitivity to look at a flattering new photo of himself on his iPhone and bemoan the fact that he's already older than the photo - an infinitesimal gap that will grow cavernous in the endless years to come. Oscar Wilde poured that kind melancholia out of himself and into the antihero of The Picture of Dorian Gray and spritzed a couple of twists of wicked narcissism into its hellish magic.

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's stage adaptation of Wilde's 1891 novel doesn't quite drop us into the age of smartphones and Twitter. Dorian and the fervid artist who paints him, Basil Hallward, are instead transplanted into 1988 London. The transition allows Shakespeare Carolina to credibly mount the drama at Duke Energy Theatre without all the luxuriant fripperies required to present the downfall of a Victorian playboy.

Lost in transition is most of the epigrammatic wit of Dorian's wicked mentor, Lord Henry Wotton. With PaperHouse Theatre's production of Wilde's A Woman of No Importance concluding its run across town at The Frock Shop on the same weekend that Dorian Gray opened at Spirit Square, it was easy enough to discover how different a stage adaptation by the author would have been.

You'll find some of the slickness and trashiness you would expect from the chief creative officer of Archie Comics - Aguire-Sarcasa's prime distinction apart from his TV work on Glee and Big Love. Yet it's quite apparent that Aguirre-Sarcasa is deeply fond of the book. His past work for Marvel Comics serves him well when we arrive at the devil's bargain that results in Dorian getting his perverse wish when he first sees Basil's worshipful portrait. Flipping the natural order, Dorian wishes that the face in the portrait would change with time while his own remains eternally the same.

The alchemy between Dorian and Basil that works the Faustian magic is excellently done in this script, but director David Hensley doesn't have the design budget at his disposal that made the devolution of the painting so memorable in the 1945 movie. Ivan Le Lorraine Albright's final portrait of Dorian - when all of his wickedness and corruption have taken their toll - enough to horrify Dorian himself - is one of the chief discoveries to be enjoyed at the Art Institute of Chicago.

At Duke Energy, Kevin Aoussou faces a photographic likeness of himself when he first beholds Basil's magical portrait, because it actually is a larger-than-life photo though everyone is pretending the paint hasn't dried. The photo is eventually defaced, but don't expect to be shocked by the alterations. Hensley leans on his stars to register Dorian's inner disintegration, and they deliver handsomely.

After delivering a fine account of the petulant Dauphin of France earlier this spring in ShakesCar's Henry V, Aoussou is urbane and commanding as Dorian in an eye-opening performance, far more kingly this time around. Ted Patterson, on the other hand, seemed overburdened with the title role in Henry V, so he achieves a resounding redemption in the neurotic role of Basil. Painting the portrait and then confronting his masterwork after the years - and Dorian's depravities - have frightfully ruined it, Basil himself frames everything that has happens. During the course of the serene lie that Aoussou suavely sketches with his charmed life, Patterson is his living counterpart, a pure soul permanently scarred by the wonder he has created and unable to understand why.

Wotton here is instrumental in retooling the modernized plot, exhibiting Dorian's portrait in a prestigious gallery toward the outset and engineering a possible film deal for Dorian toward the end. Robert Brafford, fairly fresh from a similar mentor/villain role as O'Brien in 1984, mixes up a similar cocktail as Henry, still quite elegant though Aguirre-Sacasa has demoted him from lordship - and hedonist bon mot machine - to entrepreneur. Farrell Paules, as Henry's cynical partner, is exactly what Henry deserves.

The classic beauty of Dorian attracted two notable ladies in the novel, actress Sibyl Vane, who killed herself when Dorian discarded her, and Hetty Merton, a beautiful lass that Dorian spares many years later, largely because he reminds him of Sibyl. Alexandria White does a fine job on both of these women, but the script expands the gallery of women that Dorian wrongs, so White's frolics also include a courtesan and a wanton Hollywood starlet on-the-make, well-differentiated under Hensley's direction.

All the added carnage of this adaptation requires more clean-up and more antagonism from the cast. As Alan Campbell, Nathan Morris is increasingly resentful when saddled with the disposal of Dorian's victims. Ryan Gentry gets channeled away from the role of Sibyl's jealous brother James, which gets more extensive play in the novel. In his stead, Gentry gets to be Theodore Ruxpin, an obnoxious Russian movie investor who assumes that Dorian's artistic integrity can be bought. No way: the film Dorian proposes to create out of his legendary escapades will remain the picture of Dorian Gray.

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