DFW Actor Performs Her Original Script WILDE WOMEN at Edinburgh Fringe Festival
Performances run 1-16 August.
It's 1900 and Lillie Langtry, arguably the most famous actress of her time and a great Victorian beauty, awaits a crucial telegram from her dearest friend Oscar Wilde.
While in her backstage dressing room, she plans a play presenting all his most illustrious female characters - Cecily, Salomé, Mrs Cheveley, Mrs. Erlynne and naturally, Lady Bracknell. The audience is cast as her adoring backstage visitors, whom Langtry recruits to help her choose which of Wilde's radically independent female characters to pitch for the project.
It's an audacious scheme to revive Lillie's own fading stardom and restore the reputation of Wilde who has endured sickness and disgrace after being sentenced to a brutal two years of hard labour for "gross indecency" resulting from his affair with Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas.
Now, 125 years on, premiering at the Edinburgh Fringe, Wilde Women is a one woman show by US actor, director and TCU Professor of Theatre, Krista Scott.
Full of wit and insight into two of the most influential figures in the arts world of their day, the solo play emphasizes the transformative impact of Wilde's writing on the presentation of women in theatre and literature.
She says: "Oscar Wilde had a profound effect on the representation of women onstage in the modern age.
"He launched the trend to feature strong, independent women as protagonists in dramas and in comedies, a trend picked up by George Bernard Shaw, August Strindberg and other contemporaries.
"Without Lady Windermere's Fan, a play he wrote for Lillie Langtry, G.B. Shaw would've never written Mrs. Warren's Profession, which in turn examined the propagation of prostitution.
"Much of the development of psychologically complex women's roles in today's theatre can be traced back to Wilde's work.
"I also hope the audiences will come to appreciate the dazzling wit and beguiling irony embedded in his rhetoric and want to find out more about Oscar Wilde after seeing the play."
Scott started researching Wilde and the roles he created for women nine years ago - as she discovered more about his life she grew increasingly interested in his relationship with Langtry.
Both were regarded as highly unconventional figures, sometimes feted by fashionable society and at other times damned.
Langtry was the mistress of the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, sometimes sharing a "love nest" in Scotland.
She became the first socialite to appear on the professional stage, launching her career in She Stoops to Conquer in 1881.
Her career was strongly encouraged by Wilde and she became a celebrated star in the UK and USA.
After Judge Roy Bean of Vinegaroon, TX saw the beautiful actress onstage in NYC, he renamed the town Langtry and his saloon/county courthouse "The Jersey Lily", Langtry's popular nickname.
Scandals and the squandering of huge sums of money saw her fortunes fading as the dawn of the 20th century beckoned.
The production is a chance to enjoy some of the finest moments and most remarkable characters created by Wilde, seen through the eyes of a friend whose real life and character were as dramatic as anything in his writing.
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