In ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray,’ Sarah Snook Goes Digital

About five minutes into “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” the stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel, the actress Sarah Snook, playing the louche aristocrat Lord Henry Wotton, reaches out and rests a hand on Dorian Gray’s shoulder. At nearly every performance, the audience gasps. Sometimes, from sheer delight, they giggle.

The gesture itself is simple, but the execution is so demanding that two years ago, when Snook first tried it, she had a panic attack. Snook plays both Lord Henry and Dorian Gray — and two dozen other characters, too. So she is putting her own hand on her own shoulder by way of an elaborate synthesis of live action, live video and recorded video. “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a Victorian Gothic trifle, can now be seen in portrait mode.

Even after a celebrated London run and weeks of performances at the Music Box Theater on Broadway, that moment, in which a recorded Lord Henry joins a live Dorian onscreen, hasn’t become any easier. As it approaches, Snook said she will find herself thinking: What if I’m a millimeter off? What if the magic is spoiled? The recording doesn’t protect her from imprecision, from accident. “The thing is,” she said, “it’s live theater.”

Kip Williams, the director of “Dorian Gray” and until recently the artistic director of the Sydney Theater Company, pioneered this technique, which he calls cinetheater, about a decade ago. Rehearsing a production of Tennessee Williams’s “Summer and Smoke,” he decided to stage a chase sequence in the bowels of the theater. Some colleagues encouraged him to record it, but Williams resisted.

“Theater is a live art form,” he said. “The audience knows when it’s live and when it’s not. That transiency, that temporal quality of being in the present moment is at its core.”