Seven Days: Vermont's Independent Voice

On the Rocks

“Gin Lane” isn’t a place you’d want to visit firsthand. A prostitute reaches for a pinch of snuff as her infant falls to its death. A starving man clings to a bottle of booze. Drunken lowlifes beat each other with bar stools in the streets. But this sordid scene — depicted in a 1751 engraving by famous pictorial satirist William Hogarth — is, essentially, the destination of playwright Nick Dear’s The Art of Success. Audiences tag along with a reimagined Hogarth, one who’s not so much a social critic as a participating character in one of his early editorial cartoons. More than a bawdy dark comedy about a wild evening in 1730s London, the Middlebury College production raises questions about society and art, past and present.