In the third episode of The Gilded Age, another event that shook Manhattan was reproduced on screen: the visit of the Irish poet, Oscar Wilde (Jordan Walle), in 1883, for the premiere of the play Vera, which ran for just one week.

The visit shown in the episode Head to Head is the second by the writer, who had already visited New York with great success the previous year, 1882, at the invitation of the producers of the operetta Patience: William S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. They worried that New Yorkers wouldn’t understand the jokes, and a series of talks by the author would help. At the time, Wilde was not yet the playwright he would become, and, always vain, he agreed to travel to give lectures and explain his work but ended up making the trip a personal marketing campaign, not to promote the production. He became famous, made money, and even appeared frequently in the press, leaving the moment recorded in photos signed by photographer Napoleon Sarony, traditionally among the best-known of the time.

The aestheticism movement led by Wilde was the target of jokes and criticism, but it was effective in making him known. When he returned, as we saw in The Gilded Age, he was already a star. The city was shaken, after all, Vera, starring Marie Prescott, was the first theatrical play signed by him. Although it was initially well received, when it received lukewarm reviews, the box office felt it. A week after its debut, it went out of print.

Vera, or The Nihilists, as we saw in the series, is a tragedy set in Russia and is loosely based on the life of Vera Zasulich, a feared nihilist who caused a furor in Moscow in 1878. Wilde began working on the text in 1880, to portray a topic that greatly enchanted the public at the time: Russian terrorism. Vera Zasulich was a peasant woman who tried to kill the governor of Saint Petersburg and became internationally famous.

Originally Vera was to have been staged in London, but as the Russian Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in Saint Petersburg in 1881, Wilde’s play was suspended indefinitely. Two years later, New York felt like neutral territory to her. Oscar Wilde personally supervised the production and although Marie Prescott was a star, she could not overcome the lack of public engagement and the financial loss. Apparently, the result was so bad that it has rarely been reassembled since then. Interestingly, after all the season seemed destined for success. Wilde’s presence and a huge marketing campaign with the costumes on display in the windows of Lord and Taylor’s department store on Fifth Avenue.

In The Gilded Age, there is a tragic irony. Oscar Wilde, whose life and career would be destroyed by being judged to have had relationships with other men (at the time, a crime in England), is the first to identify Oscar Van Rhijn (Blake Ritson) in his search for a marriage to hide the fact that he is homosexual. I hope the story of “our” Oscar is less tragic.

Ah!, for Oscar Wilde fans, it is in Vera that he coined the phrase: “experience, the name that men give to their mistakes”. Do you know which ‘real’ person is next to show up? None other than a Duke…

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