Vanya,
Lucille Lortel Theatre, New York,
Spring 2025.
The Picture of Dorian Gray,
Music Box Theatre, New York,
Spring–Summer 2025.
If an actor, alone onstage, starts talking to himself, we know what he’s doing: delivering a soliloquy, letting us in on his thoughts. But when several characters, all played by the same actor, begin talking to one another, what dramatic function does that serve?
One person taking all the parts—this could be absurd, a vain and foolish aspiration like Bottom’s in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But whole plays are written in this mode or adapted into it. In New York this spring, you could watch Andrew Scott portray all eight characters in an Off-Broadway adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, while, over on Broadway, you could witness Sarah Snook take on no fewer than twenty-six roles in a one-actor version of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Much of the buzz around these productions derived from screen celebrity. Snook is known for playing Shiv Roy on Succession, Scott for the “hot priest” in Fleabag as well as starring roles in Ripley and All of Us Strangers; their adaptations joined a recent wave of one-person plays banking on the fame of actors from the world of streaming content. But the shower of praise and awards these two shows have received, first in London, then in New York—most recently a Best Actress Tony for Snook—would seem to be less the tribute that the stage pays to visitors from TV and the movies, and more an awed appreciation for feats of acting that resemble high-wire juggling or decathlons.
Beyond those similarities, though, the two productions are radically different from each other. Dorian Gray is a high-tech marvel. Snook plays all those characters with the help of super-high-definition video, both pre-recorded and live. Of the six Snooks sharing a dinner-table conversation, only one is physically present. Far from solo, Snook is joined onstage by five camera operators and more stagehands in black, who continually adjust lights, hand Snook props, and dress her in a rotating succession of outfits and wigs. (All these people take bows at the end.)
Scott, by contrast, is truly alone. Simon Stephens’s adaptation moves the play to present-day Ireland, and Scott, who is Irish, portrays all the roles wearing the same slacks and silk shirt. He distinguishes each character with an identifying prop—a dishrag for saintly Sonya, a tennis ball for Michael the depressed doctor—but more by adjusting his body language and calibrating the timbre of his voice. He wears the same necklace throughout the show but nervously fingers it only when embodying the troublesomely beautiful Helena.
These divergent approaches suit sources that, although written just a few years apart, are themselves radically divergent. Wilde’s 1891 novel is all about surfaces. It’s titled after one: the painted portrait of the young and beautiful Dorian Gray, which, in fulfillment of a wish, shows the signs of aging while Gray himself does not. Wilde’s characters suppose that acts of cruelty are written on the face, in lines around the mouth—that moral corruption is revealed in physical decay. But for Dorian, that degradation happens only in the portrait that he hides away.
The novel’s attitude toward this idea is ambivalent. The witty dialogue values style above all. As the decadent aesthete, Lord Henry, says in one of Wilde’s morally inverted epigrams, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.” Yet the morality of the melodramatic plot is ultimately conventional: hedonism leads to multiple deaths. As long as Dorian looks flawless and unsullied, most people assume he’s innocent on the inside, but he does not escape paying for his sins with his life.
The prevalence of screens—a technique that this production’s director, Kip Williams, calls “cinetheater”—draws out these themes. On giant canvases, Snook’s face is hugely magnified, her performance concentrated in facial expressions to an extent more common in the cinema, or on social media, a present-day resonance the production brings out with visual jokes involving selfies and TikTok filters.
Like Scott, Snook differentiates her characters by vocal timbre, pitch, and physicality: her plummy-voiced Lord Henry slouches and sits with an entitled languor. Yet most of the kinetic excitement of the production is generated by Snook rushing about from mark to mark, manically executing the unforgivingly exact choreography of precisely where to stand and which way to look at each and every moment. In tandem with the stream of words gushing from her mouth, this dance barely lets up over the show’s two-hour duration.
As a result, we are constantly aware that we are watching a performance, a continuous stream of performances, with behind-the-scenes access. This is part of the fun, as well as a philosophical point. Wilde spoke about the characters in his novel representing different aspects of himself: the person people imagine him to be, the person he would like to be, the person he thinks he is. Having one actor play all the roles expands this idea, making us notice the performance of identity, the way all of us are forever toggling among different versions of ourselves. “Is insincerity such a terrible thing?” Wilde’s narrator asks. The Aesthetes’ answer is no: “It is merely the method by which we can multiply our personalities.”
In this context, it’s worth noting that Dorian Gray is a queer book, barely closeted. (It was used as evidence in the prosecution of Wilde for “gross indecency.”) It is a parable about double lives and hypocrisy, about the liberation and snares of role-playing. Wilde conceives character as a series of poses, especially the verbal kind. Snook’s performance, mostly across gender, is a form of drag, and it partakes of drag’s play with artifice and exaggeration. The one-person feat, and everything it visibly takes to pull it off, is an extravagance. It’s pleasurable excess and always self-aware. Sometimes the live Snook argues with one of her pre-recorded selves about which of them will tell the next part of the story. This is a production that is continually winking.
Vanya indulges in a little winking, too. Each time a minor character who has been silent for a while pipes up, a major character will say something like “When did you come in?” or “I didn’t see you there.” To which the minor character will meekly respond, “I’ve been here the whole time.”
But where the physical interaction between characters in Dorian Gray is a comic illusion, when characters touch each other in Vanya it’s both more physiological and more imaginary, and consequentially both comic and affecting. Scott is only touching himself, but through the placement of his body in relation to an afterimage (of the placement of his body as a different character), two characters seem to make contact—wrestling for possession of a vodka bottle, snogging up against a freestanding door. In the physical world, they cannot come together, because Scott cannot split himself in two. But for the same reason, they are already joined in body. The tears of one character remain wet on Scott’s face as he voices the reaction of another.
If Dorian Gray is about surfaces and what they can and cannot conceal, Vanya is about presences and absences. The story revolves around a character that Scott doesn’t portray, one who doesn’t appear in Chekhov’s play: the sister of Vanya, whose death years before the action begins has caused the characters’ lives to fall apart, leaving the hole that is the secret source of the grief, resentment, disappointment, and longing the characters express. Since all the roles share a single body, the stage is often inhabited by people we know are there even though we can’t see them. The production heightens the metaphor with the dead sister’s player piano; at one point, Ivan picks out the upper part of that sibling staple “Heart and Soul” while the piano, or the sister’s ghost, plays the bottom. Espe-cially when all the characters gather, we must keep them alive in our minds.
What a contrast with the visual clarity of Dorian Gray. But an equally important difference is sonic. Snook barely takes a breath between words, while Scott employs nearly as much silence as speech. Each line of his hangs in the air for a moment before the response, as though in a tennis match played at the pace of chess. As in any drama, all that time and space is a resonant chamber for emotion. But the one-person format creates a special kind of echo, one that feels internal, as in a soliloquy, but with the taking-turns rhythm of conversation. Each pause is an opening.
When Scott looks out at the audience, it feels as if he is speaking to you alone. But unlike in the presentational address of the narrator in Dorian Gray or even in a soliloquy, Scott isn’t talking to the audience; he’s a character addressing another character, sometimes back and forth in the most intimate dialogue. Because he is facing the audience, though, we become the addressed, like the “you” in lyric poetry. We take the place of one character, then the other, trading off with Scott. We become involved.
Another name for this effect is empathy, which is of course at the heart of Chekhov’s art. It’s nearly the reverse of Wilde’s insincere artifice, the sort of thing Lord Henry would mock. Snook’s virtuosic role-playing, as much as the screens, distances with the delights of style. The multiplying personalities block empathy with irony. But the effect of Scott’s performance in all its comic pathos is to suggest a groundwater of feeling that links all the characters and all of us strangers, too. Chekhov’s people try and try to connect, and mostly fail, except that Scott connects them. When, at the end, the plain and put-upon Sonya asks, “What can we do?” and answers, “We must live our lives,” she is speaking for herself and her Uncle Vanya, who at least have each other. When Scott voices her, she speaks for everyone.
Brian Seibert is the author of What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing. He teaches at Yale University.