Wilde Detour

Not every writer can be mistaken for John Gay, the 18th century dramatist and wit who belonged to the Scriblerus Club with Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift and who is best remembered for his satirical play “The Beggar’s Opera.”

But John Gay, the author of the one-man play about Oscar Wilde, “Diversions & Delights,” coming Saturday to the Irvine Barclay Theatre, and the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of “Separate Tables” and such other Hollywood fare as “No Way to Treat a Lady” and “Sometimes a Great Notion,” has had that happen to him many times--particularly when “The Beggar’s Opera” gets a production.

“It’s funny what people think,” he said the other day from his home in Pacific Palisades. “Amazing, really. CBS once did a presentation, and the next morning I was getting calls telling me how much they loved it. By the third call, I just began saying, ‘Thank you.’ It made things easier.”

What dismays him most, he says, is that “intelligent people whom I thought were educated” are the ones who mistake him for the long-dead writer. Besides, Gay adds, “I’m not that old.” He is a hale 73.

The better educated or perhaps just the more imaginative sometimes say to him, “Oh, so you’ve taken a pen name.” But they are wrong too. He is named for his grandfather, John Thomas Gay, a barber from the Midwest. And the writer’s trade, far from being handed down to him, became his sui generis between stints as a stage actor working on local radio in New York in the late 1940s and early ‘50s.

Gay, a Whittier native, says that if he owes his start as a dramatist to anyone, it is to Fredric March and Florence Eldridge, both major stars in those days, who chose to do his first half-hour play in a live broadcast on Lux Video Theater.

“That went national,” Gay recalls. “I thought, ‘Gee whiz, maybe I’ll turn to writing instead of acting.’ Which is pretty much what I’ve done since.”

Burt Lancaster’s independent production company brought Gay to Hollywood, where his first screen adaptation, 1958’s “Run Silent, Run Deep” (starring Lancaster and Clark Gable), launched a successful screenwriting career. He has had more than a dozen movies produced from his scripts and at least three dozen movies for television.

If not for the strike by the Writers Guild in early 1977, Gay might not have turned his hand to “Diversions & Delights.” The enforced idleness led him back to the theater, to say nothing of Oscar Wilde. “The man was a supreme conversationalist,” Gay notes. “All you had to do was put him on a stage, and away he’d go. That was the premise of the whole thing.”

Gay invented a simple dramatic device. Knowing that Wilde was down and out in Paris for two years before he died in 1900, following his famous trial and conviction for sodomy, he imagined him going on the lecture circuit. “I thought, ‘What if he tried to get some money by hiring an old Parisian music hall and just started in saying: “Well, here I am. Have a look at me.” ?’ ”

The self-exiled Wilde, who had become an object of ridicule in London, never did put himself on exhibit in Paris, but he might have, given his pride and defiance. The scenario made so much sense to Vincent Price that he took “Diversions & Delights” on the road in 1977-78, touring it triumphantly from San Francisco to New York, where he did it on Broadway, and kept doing it for years afterward on college campuses.

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Ken Ruta, who is playing Wilde in Saturday’s revival at the Irvine Barclay, did the show in May in San Francisco, on the 100th anniversary of Wilde’s release from Reading Gaol. Ruta, a leading member of the Bay Area’s American Conservatory Theatre, also has many Broadway credits.

“Ken gives what I think is a more realistic feeling of Wilde than Price, who was very flamboyant and extremely entertaining,” Gay says. “But what makes the piece are not just the witticisms and the flamboyance. Underneath the brilliant facade is a very human being.”

“Wilde was very vulnerable to his own fame. He knew his strengths and weaknesses. But he was very vain--and that did him in when it came to the trial. He thought he knew so much more than everyone else. The first act I purposely made a romp. The second gives us the depth.”

* “Diversions & Delights” will have one performance on Saturday at 8 p.m. Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive (at West Peltason). $16-$20. (714) 854-4646.