FORMAR: Filmed / virtual opera (premiered online)

WORLD PREMIERE VIDEO: May 15, 2021

CREATED, WRITTEN, AND DIRECTED BY: Georgia Shreve

RUNTIME: Approximately 90 minutes (full-length)

The Art of

Being Oscar

 

A filmed, full-length “virtual opera” that turns Oscar Wilde’s life into a chamber of wit, beauty, and consequence.

“Wit is a mask. This is the face underneath.”

Premiered on

The Art of Being Oscar is an original work by Georgia Shreve (music, lyrics, and book), created for the camera and premiered online in 2021. Centered on Oscar Wilde, it moves through the brilliance and volatility of a life lived in public, where language can feel like velvet, and truth can still cut. The piece is at once musical portrait, theatrical collage, and love letter to the artistry of self-invention.

Built in a season when performance migrated to screens, The Art of Being Oscar embraces the intimacy of filmed storytelling. Close-ups become confidences. Silence becomes subtext. And Wilde’s voice, by turns epigrammatic and exposed, is allowed to live in the space between aria and confession.

This is Wilde not as marble icon, but as human instrument: glittering, restless, and heartbreakingly aware of what the world demands from anyone who refuses to be ordinary.

In georgia’s words

 “I’ve always been drawn to Wilde because he understood performance the way composers do: not as decoration, but as survival. This piece isn’t a biography. It’s a listening. It’s a way of hearing the cost of brilliance, and the beauty that still insists on existing anyway.”

CAST INCLUDES

Carla Jablonski

as Lady Jane Wilde and Lady Bracknell

Alex McKissick

as Lord Douglas and Rossetti

Brandon Cedel

as Oscar Wilde

Anthony Pulgram

as John Ruskin, Lord Townsend, and the Prince of Wales

ABOUT THE WORK

The Art of Being Oscar is an original work by Georgia Shreve (music, lyrics, and book), created for the camera and premiered online in 2021. Centered on Oscar Wilde, it moves through the brilliance and volatility of a life lived in public, where language can feel like velvet, and truth can still cut. The piece is at once musical portrait, theatrical collage, and love letter to the artistry of self-invention.

Built in a season when performance migrated to screens, The Art of Being Oscar embraces the intimacy of filmed storytelling. Close-ups become confidences. Silence becomes subtext. And Wilde’s voice, by turns epigrammatic and exposed, is allowed to live in the space between aria and confession.

This is Wilde not as marble icon, but as human instrument: glittering, restless, and heartbreakingly aware of what the world demands from anyone who refuses to be ordinary.

License this work

To license, present, or inquire about The Art of Being Oscar, please contact: Ideation Productions, LLC

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Mother in the Snow
In “Mother in the Snow,” Georgia Shreve turns a winter stumble into a piercing portrait of maternal endurance under watchful eyes. Dark humor and raw imagery reveal a woman improvising her way forward while trying to hold dignity, and herself, together.
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In “No Pity for Pigeons,” Georgia Shreve transforms a quiet park encounter into a piercing social portrait of class, displacement, and human vulnerability. What begins with birds and cake ends with a deeper grief: not for pigeons, but for people quietly pushed to the margins of the worlds they once called ordinary.
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You, we, I
In “You, We, I,” Shreve turns pronouns into emotional architecture, mapping how intimacy moves between fusion and fracture. With spare, incantatory lines, the poem captures two people reaching for truth through glare, innocence, and uncertainty, before landing on a haunting final shift from “we” back to “I.”
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The Countess of M—
In nineteenth-century France, a sheltered aristocratic daughter enters a secret romance with a fallen nobleman, discovering both the thrill of being chosen and the cost of defying the social order around her.
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The Odds
A darkly funny three-scene play about two sisters who grow up treating family dysfunction like a math problem. Ten years later, memory returns with teeth, and “the odds” becomes the name for what was hidden in plain sight.
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The Enigma Variations
In “The Enigma Variations,” a daughter chronicles her composer mother’s brilliance and unraveling as harassment, domestic pressure, and illness sever her from the piano that defines her life. Expansive, intimate, and devastating, the story is both elegy and indictment, revealing how a creative life can be erased long before death.
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