Rehearsals were strenuous, not least because Snook had recently given birth to her daughter and she wasn’t sleeping much. She described shooting the recorded sequences, including that first one, as one of the hardest experiences of her career. In addition to delivering her lines with conviction, in costume and wig, with differentiated gesture and voice, she also had to remember elaborate choreography of where to look and when to move and speak, so that the video, designed by David Bergman, might eventually sync with the live image.
“The pressure of that was a lot,” she said.
I first saw the payoff of that pressure in a Times Square rehearsal room in late February. Snook, dressed in athleisure, stood on a makeshift stage. Five camera operators surrounded her, two with Steadicams strapped to their torsos, three manipulating cameras on tripods. These same operators handed Snook props — a cigarette, a paintbrush — as she morphed from one character to another, purring Wildean aphorisms.
“Go, camera five,” a stage manager murmured into a headset. “Go, camera one.”
On monitors in front of Williams and his colleagues, this live video was merged with the recorded sequences. The floor was dotted with dozens of pieces of colored tape, delineating precisely where Snook would have to stand so that the image of the shoulder touch would make sense. If she were off by even a millimeter, the moment in which Lord Henry seduces Dorian into a life of pleasure wouldn’t read.
“It’s practice, practice, practice,” Williams said. “It’s all about hard groundwork.”
Two weeks later, the show was in previews at the Music Box Theater. Here, Snook was joined onstage not only by the camera operators and crew members responsible for pulling cables out of the way and adjusting camera lights, but also a patchwork of screens large and small. Sometimes she stood or sat in front of them, sometimes they concealed her from the audience. Offstage, a focus puller, a vision switcher and a video supervisor helped to coordinate the images.