Gregory Prest: pulling up the floorboards of coded history with musical fantasy De Profundis: Oscar Wilde in Jail

12 Feb 2024 - Photos courtesy of Soulpepper Gregory Prest headshot by Dahlia Katz

"I have had a relationship to this piece since I was a teenager," says Gregory Prest of Oscar Wilde's letter/poem/manifesto/confession written from prison, De Profundis. "I grew up in a time and a place where Oscar and Bosie’s relationship, read about in biographies for school projects, was the only gay relationship I had encountered. Ever. Until I was in a relationship myself. Even then, their actual relationship was often only hinted at and never explicit. Because the letter De Profundis is so coded, filled with subtext, it’s difficult to get a clear picture, so one has to start filling in the blanks. I wanted role models. I wanted to see men in relationship to one another, but the way Oscar and Bosie are spoken about is so distasteful." The subtext was unable to be revealed as its proper urtext and "I filled in the blanks, made some conclusions about how these kinds of relationships work, began to believe some harmful things and moved on with my life."

With his long term relationship, and his theatrical career (Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train, A Streetcar Named Desire, Little Menace, Rose, Bed and Breakfast, La Bete) solidified, Prest returned to Wilde's work. "In my forties, and with this creative team, I was really interested in interrupting this incomplete, corrupted, and distorted narrative. I wanted to go back into this letter and make a case for love, for hope, for possibility. Of course, we know how their story ends (in point form), but one never really knows in the moment of one’s life how it will end. I wanted to stop time, interrupt inevitability, and allow Oscar’s thinking about the future and next steps to ring out. It is profound to me that he accepts that one must walk with one’s sorrow hand in hand. One cannot deny it, ignore it, be consumed by it – one must acknowledge it’s there and keep going. I mean, come on! We wanted to rewrite some harmful narratives."

And what better way to counter a negative narrative than to turn it into a musical. "Making this letter into a musical is a terrible idea," says Prest, "but using music to help understand and communicate the heights of the pain, sorrow, and anger feels like the most natural thing. We don’t call it a musical only because the music in this piece doesn’t function like music in a traditional show. It doesn’t always take the action further. Sometimes it reflects what’s happening with Oscar, sometimes it distracts from what’s happening which is its own kind of reflection. We’ve settled on calling it a 'musical fantasy' but that’s still a working description."

Prest had collaborated with Mike Ross and Sarah Wilson on their musical Rose, so the creative process was easy to settle into. "Go away and work, come back together and work, go away and work, come back together and work. We laughed a lot," says Prest. "Sometimes we think about the piece of a glass bowl that we shattered, and we take each broken piece and look at it on its own. The accumulative observation and experience is the show. It’s always been an experiment and while the show as it is now may actually look and feel like a good old normal piece of theatre, every step of this was a question. It was a puzzle and we were all game to keep trying to figure it out." 'A good old normal piece of theatre' maybe, but, "Mike and Sarah’s music is amazing. I hope that people leave having felt they experienced what it must have been like to sit next to Oscar Wilde at a dinner party. Sort of. He was a true celebrity and people either loved him or loathed him. I would also love for young people, heck middle aged or old people too, to leave with a sense of his nature, genius, humour, provocativeness, and wit so that when they encounter a Wildean piece again, it might shift how they experience it."

The entire project became even more collaborative with the welcome addition of Damien Atkins (Here Lies Henry, Queen Goneril, King Lear, Caroline, or Change, We Are Not Alone, The Gay Heritage Project, London Road, Sextet, Mr Burns) as Wilde. "There was no one else we wanted to do this project with," says Prest. "He has wit, intelligence, deep vulnerability, hysterical rage (the funny and not so funny kind), camp, and humanity in spades. It’s the most obvious casting. Damien is also one of my favourite people, a dear friend, and a flat out star. He makes everything he touches better. I feel so lucky to work with him on this because we have the same desire – to dig up the coded, pasted over given circumstances of Oscar and Bosie’s fragmented relationship and put them out there as relatable and recognizable moments in a contemporary gay person’s life. We made this show for and with Damien."

And with two other up-and-coming triple threats: Colton Curtis and Jonathan Corkal-Astorga. "I’m so damn lucky," says Prest. "Their roles were created with them and their amazing diverse talents in the room. These parts are tailor made for them. There was no audition process. They are both excellent talents and collaborative, humble, and fun people. With Bosie (Colton), I knew I wanted him to move, to haunt, and to wow – to be a specter – and he had to be beautiful. With Robbie (Jonathan), I knew I wanted the accompanist - the person who makes the expression possible – to be Robbie – Oscar’s dearest friend, supporter, and a gay icon in his own right. He needed to possess infinite love and that’s Jonathan."

With De Profundis: Oscar Wilde in Jail now up and running, Prest is ready for the next step in his career. "I’ll be acting in The Inheritance at Canadian Stage very soon and then a remount of Streetcar Named Desire at Soulpepper in the summer. I like all of it. I really do love shifting my roles in the room. Spending time acting allows me to learn so much about directing. The same is true the other way around. I love being able to help create a world." Especially this specific world he first encountered forty years ago. "What has surprised me most is discovering how few people didn’t know that Oscar Wilde was imprisoned," muses Prest. History has hidden a lot and Prest is eager that be corrected. "Oh, God, I hope De Profndis: Oscar Wild in Jail is an invitation for empathy. I can’t believe I just said that. By trying to pull up the floorboards of its coded history, the piece is a love letter and offers shards of the sorrow and pain of loving someone – of loving someone and loving yourself through someone else’s eyes – the pain, ecstasy, and insanity of that. It is also insanely private. I think there is quiet power in hearing something so private spoken in a room full of people. We want to leave room for the audience to have their own unique experience."

Best of all, "This is going to be gay as fuck," says Prest. "Deep purple. We’ve spent much of our time trying to pull up the coded floorboards and put its gayness center stage." Wilde's entire life was spent coded and struggling against those floorboards that held him down. How does Prest think the icon would feel about his final work being presented in a way that is gay as fuck? "I think he would hate it," says Prest. "But we’re doing it out of love – for him, for Bosie, for Robbie, for a complicated legacy their story leaves. And for the audience. It’s February – let’s have some love."