The flamboyant Dublin-born playwright and prose stylist was only 46 when he died in 1900 and is remembered mainly for four or five major plays and a few brilliant essays.
In theatrical source books, Wilde is often wedged between Ibsen?s ?The Wild Duck? and the volume?s entry on playwright Thornton Wilder, with his minor works frequently remaining unmentioned.
One of those items, a longish one-act, ?A Florentine Tragedy,? has unexpectedly turned up in a tidy, well-directed workshop production presented by the Xoregos Performing Company in residence at the Common Basis Theatre on Manhattan?s Eighth Avenue.
The play, written in 1893, appears to be Wilde?s second foray into the world of Renaissance Italy, this first having been ?The Duchess of Padua,? which had appeared in 1891.
?A Florentine Tragedy,? written in an appealing prose style vaguely reminiscent of Shakespeare, tells a rather conventional tale of a triangle involving a Florentine cloth merchant whose young wife dallies with a local princeling while her husband is away selling his silks and brocades.
Wilde?s wit and his sense of wily invention flood ?A Florentine Tragedy,? elevating it above the level of routine period dramas. The playwright?s wry awareness of the subtleties of human behavior likely prompted him to write a kind of trick ending that shifts this play into the realm of tongue-in-cheek comedy, as opposed to pure classic tragedy.
For Sheila Xoregos?s modest but nicely paced production, stage designer Charle Ard has provided an appealing series of brightly painted flats, including a large, dominant view of the Duomo, to remind us that we are, in fact, in Florence in the 16th Century.
?A Florentine Tragedy? is, strictly speaking, only about 85 percent Oscar Wilde. A London theater club, wishing to present the play in 1906, found it somewhat unfinished, and approached Robert Ross, Wilde?s loyal friend and literary executor, about the possibility of commissioning a kind of prologue to flesh out the manuscript.
Ross agreed, and the job went to poet and essayist Thomas Sturge Moore, who provided a domestic scene to be played before the point at which Wilde began the play.
Wilde?s play begins with the return of the unnamed merchant, bearing rich fabrics he has acquired on his travels. He finds his youthful wife, Bianca, entertaining Prince Guido Bardi, who is presented to him as a potential customer for his elegant goods.
The merchant, who is far from foolish, intuits the real nature of the prince?s presence in his house, and determines to rectify the situation.
How he does it, and the effect his solution has on his relationship with his wife, is both the core of Wilde?s invention and the source of what might be called the play?s ironic ?trick? ending.
The production has the distinct advantage of one particularly fine performance by a little-known actor, Peter Johnson, who makes something both sympathetic and menacing of the role of the merchant, who controls much of the play?s action.
?A Florentine Tragedy,? running 40 minutes, occupies the latter half of the bill, preceded by four brief works of varying quality. The best of them, Robert E. diNardo?s ?Protected,? is the story of a mature man, Gene, beautifully played by Johnson, who is haunted by his childhood memories of the abuse he suffered at the hands of a racist, prejudiced nun named sister Regina Ange, played as a stiff-faced ogre by Carin Murphy.