Oscar Wilde Salon Series: Examining Wilde Through the Queer Lens

Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Oscar Wilde is known as much for his persona and style as he is for his literary contributions. He famously said, “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” Oscar Wilde was a brilliant and witty dramatist, a passionate socialist, a father, a husband and fantastically queer.

Wilde enjoyed tremendous fame in his lifetime mainly through his own masterful manipulation of the press and the social elite. His self-promotion would also prove to be his undoing resulting in two trials that would ultimately lead to his imprisonment for homosexual acts.

Join Writer’s Theatre Artistic Director, Michael Halberstam and Dr. Jeffrey Kessler of University of Illinois Chicago, as they lead an evening of dramatic readings and discussion of Wilde’s controversial life as seen through his writings and key biographical moments.

Michael Halberstam is the co-founder of Writers Theatre. He has directed over thirty-five productions for the company, including The Importance of Being Earnest (pictured above) and has appeared in numerous Writers Theatre productions. Elsewhere he directed for Northlight Theatre, Illinois Shakespeare Festival, Jean Cocteau Repertory in New York, Drury Lane Theatre, Off-Broadway at 59E59 Theaters in New York City, Milwaukee Repertory Theater, Lincoln Center Theater in New York and San Jose Repertory Theatre. He spent two and a half years teaching Shakespeare at The Theatre School at DePaul University and was named the Chicago Tribune’s 2013 “Chicagoan of the Year” for Theater.

Jeffrey C. Kessler works at the intersection of fiction, criticism, and art in the nineteenth century. He is currently working on two book projects. Portraits of the fin-de-siecle examines portraiture across media as part of emerging modern conceptions of subjectivity in the nineteenth century. He is also co-authoring a textbook, tentatively titled A People’s Grammar, which marries traditional grammar instruction with democratic principles of style. His work has appeared in several academic journals including Nineteenth-Century Contexts, English Literature in Transition, and Victorian Studies. He received his PhD in English from Indiana University and taught at DePaul University for several years. Currently, he is a lecturer in the English department at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Pictured Above: Aaron Todd Douglas (Reverend Canon Chasuble), Anita Chandwaney (Miss Prism), Rebecca Hurd (Cecily Cardew), Alex Goodrich (Jack Worthing), Steve Haggard (Algernon Moncrieff), Shannon Cochran (Lady Bracknell) and Jennifer Latimore (Gwendolen Fairfax) in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest directed by Michael Halberstam at Writers Theatre. Photo by Michael Brosilow.

Image: Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Photograph by Napoleon Sarony ca. 1882.