Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde

"Gross Indecency is without a doubt one of the events of the 1997 theater season. The brilliant drama not only snowballed into the most popular Off-Broadway play of the season, but it garnered accolades to match...Based on letters, biographies, and court transcripts, it tells the true story of Oscar Wilde's trials for 'gross indecency with male persons'. The author of The Importance of Being Earnest was at the height of his fame when he chose to sue his lover's father for slander. Thus began Wilde's precipitous descent from the most celebrated playwright in the English language to a condemned and broken man of almost universal scorn. It was a public fall from grace that not only destroyed Wilde but signaled to many a triumph of morality. In this dramatization, Moisés Kaufman interweaves dramatic courtroom testimony with Wilde's own words and the many voices of his contemporaries. The result is an entirely new, often surprising, portrait of this brilliant and complicated man, proving Wilde's own statement that 'the truth is rarely pure and never simple.'" -- From inside cover of jacket