There are as many Lady Windemere's Fan(s) as there are productions.

The one at St. Paul's Park Square Theatre, which opened in early May after Ellen's TV outing was, in effect, an outing of the play.

The word "homosexual" was not spoken in the play, nor has it been inserted.

But when the character known as Ms. Erlynne, the woman with a Past, stands on stage, draped in black, to tell us what Society can do to one who has strayed, she becomes what she must have been for Wilde when he wrote the part: the Ghost of his Future, in which he would lose all.

Oscar Wilde, the man-behind-the-fan was the playwright who, with this comedy that originally opened in 1892, an artist with all London at his feet. Only three years later, convicted of homosexual acts, he then had all England at his throat.

Oscar's great comedies continued to be produced in London after his arrest and sentencing to two years at hard labor but his name was, in the late 19th century, removed from the billboards.

The programs at St. Paul's Park Square are available to all-- including students--often furnishing their first exposures to live stage productions. This play's (late 20th century) program provides a full essay on Wilde's life, including not only Wilde's name, but the words "homosexuality" and "sodomy."

Richard Cook, the director, speaking to Badpuppy's GayToday, noted his use of a new biography of Oscar Wilde, The Stranger Wilde: Interpreting Oscar by Gary Schmidgall (Dutton, New York, 1994) which, among other things, de-codes the plays, showing that long before the closet door was opened for Wilde with terrible consequences, he was able, in his plays--and in Lady Windemere's Fan (through the female leads--Mrs. Erlynne and Lady Windemere) to plead both a case for women (and against the Double Standard) and for what Marcel Proust was later to call (referring to both gay men and lesbians) "the men-women of Sodom."

This St. Paul production, choosing to center on the exchange of the "pure" and "soiled" women--who are not simply "sisters under the skin" -- but, we learn, in reality daughter-and-mother--has removed much of the emphasis both on luxe riches and on "light" comedy.

The jokes, the famous one and two-liners Wilde used and re-used in other plays, are still there, and the characters who spoke them are there too, but somehow, all dressed more or less alike, the males seem to emerge as agreeable (and sometimes childish) penguins. The drama is centered on the two women.

And their dresses? Mrs. Erlynne, joking, tells that if she were truly repentant she would have to show it by using a bad dressmaker and that is something she is unwilling to do.

Certainly in this play, the dresses are--no other word--magnificent and--telling--they bespeak a world of luxury, and also a contest of darkness-and-light using the colors black and white for both Lady Windemere and Mrs. Erlynne, taking us from one morning (and one morning-room), into the night and--its dark middle--to a new morning and a final dress (Mrs. Erlynne's) with the colors of the rainbow and the buds on burgeoning trees.

Let's join hands, starting with applause for that dressmaker and costume designer Lynn Farrington, as well as the two women who fill the dresses (and the parts) so well: Tena May Gallivan as the very young Lady Windemere and Jodi Kellog as the once-erring Ms. Erlynne.

More applause to come: for Bob Lunning who has created a curious, simplified abstracted series of sets, which seem part Art Deco, very un-Victorian and bare as any sets for a Racine or Corneille play.

And for the cast, too numerous to mention, let us find room here for the penguin-males, held up and wrung out by Oscar for their sexism: Dwight Gunderson, as Lord Windemere, Bradford Martin as Lord Darlington (would be seducer), Steven Weiss as Lord Augustus (fool and fop). Only one male escapes: the butler, Parker, played by Dale Pfeilsticker. This production gives him no more lines than does the original Wilde script and puts him on-stage, alone, in front of the curtain prior to the play's beginning and before it re-starts he sets things right, to assure us--as he does as a Silent Witness--that, while the drama progresses its only a play and he, we, are part of it.

Final, real applause for this production.

Many think these Wilde plays outmoded. They're comedies, ending happily, while Wilde's life, they point out, ended unhappily, exiled in Paris.

But the drama did not end there. The play is a plea for women, for equality for women, for equality for divorced women--and--has, here a subtext made text, a plea for those Exiled for what Society would call a Sin.

In the play Lady Windemere is never to let her child know she is still alive. But Wilde's sons, whose last names were changed to their mother's name, lived to acknowledge and celebrate their extraordinary, wronged father, writing about him.

The ancient Greek poetess Sappho, bisexual like Wilde, writing to her daughter as she, Sappho, lay dying said: "Words that I write are immortal. Dead, I will not be forgotten."

And here is Wilde: Unmasked. Unforgotten. Ending his play, on stage still, long past his disgrace in 1895, not with night but with all-the-colors-of-the-rainbow, in the morning and in the Morning Room, as the stage instructions tell us.

Many thanks to Director Richard Cook and to the Park Square Theatre in St. Paul (the city, not the man).