FERNDALE, Mich.–What would you do to fend off aging? To be young forever? And of you try to cut a deal with the devil, how’s that going to work out for you?

These are the issues for Dorian Gray in the Slipstream Initiative’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, playing now through June 12.

In Wilde’s story, a painter, Basil Hallward, is fascinated by young, beautiful Dorian Gray. In Slipstream’s adaptation, Dorian (Steve Xander Carson) is a young, intense film actor in the 1930s or 40s, and Basil (Bailey Boudreau) is his director, fixated on and in love with Dorian, and clearly jealous of any one else’s attentions trained on his muse. In Wilde’s story, Gray only ages in the painting, not in life. Here, he will remain youthful until the ending of the story when writer and director Luna Alexander finds her parallel for what happens to Dorian on celluloid film.

Basil introduces Dorian to Harry Wotten (Ryan Ernst), a film producer who captures the young actor’s attentions and imagination with his hedonistic and cynical world view: that sensual fulfillment is what is most important in life. About people in love who believe in monogamy, Harry says: “What they call fidelity, I call lack of imagination. Only shallow people love once.” Snap!

As Dorian comes to absorb the idea that his worth is in his face and lovely form in Harry’s world, he expresses the desire to sell his soul to keep himself valid in a world that discards unexceptional people. In one brutal scene, faithful to Wilde’s story, Dorian’s great love, Sibyl Vane (Kaitlyn Valor Bourque), loses her gift for acting. Her stage turns as Juliet, which so enthralled Dorian, have gone from transcendent to hack. She admits she has lost her muse and focus because of how deeply she has fallen for Dorian. She can no longer act love now that she has discovered the real thing. Dorian is disgusted by her now, as she is devoid of her talent and art–the thing that made her special in his mind.

So as not to give away the turns of the plot, it suffices to say that people die along Dorian’s Faustian journey. Mr. Carson cuts an impressive figure as Dorian. Tall, lean, uber-fit and with movie-star looks evocative of, say Farley Granger, he plays the title character with just the right manic intensity that keeps him from being seen as just a villain. Mr. Boudreau is at once the world-savvy movie director and the sensitive, and ultimately victimized impresario who is devoted to his love and muse. Mr. Ernst fills the small Slipstream space with acerbic philosophy and stage smoke as he is never without his cigarette (it is almost too much for the space). Ms. Bourque is a lot of fun to watch as she plays the tragic Sibyl, as well as the a party woman who drifts in and out of the story. She has both the perfect bone structure and ingénue qualities of the delicate 1930s actress, and shows nice range as she ruins her Juliet role with great comedic effect, and then makes us ache a bit for her putting her eggs in such the wrong basket.

The set for Dorian Gray is minimal, with settings changes just with furniture shifts and chair placement. There is a curious thing, though, that happens with the set during a few moments when the audience is led out of the performance space and into an outer studio in lieu of a real intermission. That minimal set keeps the focus on the words and the actors.

Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde’s only novel. It was very controversial for the time it was published. Indeed, the magazine that first published it censored a chunk of the story, which was later restored. Wilde was forced to repeatedly defend the work in the face of moral outrage from the prim British reviewers of the 1890s.

Dorian Gray has a lot to teach and audience if they are there to listen, absorb and wonder about their own lives and what may be on their own scorecard of life. What sorts of bargains have we made to try and get what we want? How many people have we run over? What is really important in life? How does our life ledger look when it comes to how we have treated loved ones and the people who have entered and exited our lives?

Slipstream shows once again that its ability to adapt and/or rescue classics and forgotten or seldom-performed stories is a real gift to the community.

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