In his most purple passages, he writes like Oscar Wilde on steroids; there's sometimes a Paterian luxuriance in the prose, a specifying gorgeousness.

As the two women’s tentative friendship develops in intriguing ways, Mr. Oswald and Ms. Woodard push the action beyond the play’s more purple passages.

Effects like these, not purple passages, not epigrams nor aphorisms, are the test of oratory.