For her madcap, one-woman take on a stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Sarah Snook is this year’s best actress in a play winner. Though she plays 26 roles, she’ll get just one Tony statuette.
Over the course of the show’s two frenetic hours, the actress, 37, best known for her Emmy-winning turn as Logan Roy’s girlboss daughter, Shiv, on HBO’s dark comedy-drama “Succession,” plays all the characters, among them a handsome rake, a martini-sipping libertine and a hapless artist.
The audience gets a close-up view of Snook on a large, rectangular screen that hangs from the top of the stage as cameras follow her rushing around the stage, de-wigging and re-wigging, and interacting with prerecorded versions of herself.
“It’s about concealing and revealing, putting on masks, taking off masks,” Snook, who made her Broadway debut in the show, told The New York Times this spring. “It’s about having your soul be seen.”
Snook originally performed the show last year in London’s West End, where she won the Olivier Award and where critics praised the production’s clever camerawork and Snook’s chameleonic, playful embodiment of the various characters.
Critics in the United States were more measured: Writing in The Times, Jesse Green praised her “convincing and compelling” characterizations, yet noted that the copious use of technology left the production feeling “brittle,” “often denying the human contact, and contract, that are at the heart of theater’s effectiveness.” (Though the production, he noted, was “technologically spectacular.”)
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
