ABSTRACT
In the spring of 2015, a year after playing Salomé, as I approached the tombstone of Oscar Wilde, at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, I was the same age that he was when he died—46. The wing-and-stone monument, a sphinx carved by Jacob Epstein, considered by some a demon-angel, now restrained behind a barrier of glass, not unlike the barrier between a passenger and driver in a NYC cab, or the glass shield of an officer in riot gear, or the glass that separates a premature baby from its mother. It is speculated that Epstein was inspired by Wilde’s poem “The Sphinx,” which contains the verse “Sing to me all your memories” (2013b). Epstein’s monument to Wilde has come to be known as the embodiment of modernity.
