VCUarts Theatre presents Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde by Moisés Kaufman, a thrilling courtroom drama based on the true events surrounding the downfall of celebrated poet and playwright Oscar Wilde in Victorian England. Gross Indecency uses trial transcripts, personal correspondence, interviews and other source materials to tell the story of the 1895 trials that resulted in Wilde being arrested and imprisoned for the crime of sodomy. In April 1895, Wilde brought a libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his youthful lover, who had publicly maligned Wilde as a sodomite. In starting the libel suit, Wilde set in motion the series of events that would culminate in his own ruin and imprisonment. Within a year the bewildered Wilde himself was on trial for acts of gross indecency and, implicitly—for a vision of art and morality that outraged Victorian propriety. Expertly interweaving courtroom testimony with excerpts from Wilde’s writings and the words of his contemporaries, Gross Indecency unveils its subject in all his genius and human frailty, his age in all its complacency and repression.