Salome - Oscar Wilde

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Berkeley, Aurora Theatre Company
August 25 - October 1, 2006

    Shall we dance? Perhaps not. You never know what the consequences might be.
    Oscar Wilde’s groundbreaking 1892 drama, Salome, generally is associated in the public consciousness with the title character’s famed "Dance of the Seven Veils." Further popularized by the Richard Strauss opera, the dance has been performed by divas – large or lithe – in various stages of dress and undress, the latest being Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, who recently bared all for an adoring audience at New York's Metropolitan Opera.
    Aurora Theatre, although it is in Berkeley, eschews nudity for nuance in its presentation of the Wilde classic. Miranda Calderon embodies all the title character’s conflicting emotions in her movements: the torment of youth, unfulfilled lust, anger and rebellion against her parents. She may keep her clothes on but Chris Black’s erotic choreography leaves very little to the imagination. Salome dances for her stepfather, King Herod, the puppet ruler of the Roman-occupied land of the Hebrews. He has promised her anything she wants as a reward and what she wants is the head of Iokanaan, the prophet (John the Baptist), who is imprisoned in a cistern in the palace courtyard. Mark Anderson Phillips plays the prophet, for the most part while hanging from a cage above the stage, bellowing and raging in high Biblical style.
    The cast is rounded out by Julia Brothers as Herodias, Herod’s wife, Salome’s mother and target of much of the prophet’s abuse, and a sexually ambiguous chorus of soldiers and courtiers. Brothers, clad in a magnificent robe (Callie Floor’s costume design), combines the looks of Maggie Smith with the hauteur of Lauren Bacall to good effect. The supporting cast is gender-bending, the men openly gay and the women pretending to be men. Here, director Mark Jackson dips into the author’s own sexual conflicts – married, with two children, yet in thrall to “the love that dares not speak its name.”
    Herod, the king, is played by the fabulous Ron Campbell (The Thousandth Night). Clad in a red velvet smoking jacket set off by a gaudy jeweled brooch and crowned with a wreath of blood-red roses (there almost are as many references to blood in the script as to the omnipresent moon), Campbell swishes across the landscape of the play, lusting after his stepdaughter and his male bodyguards alike. And somehow it works, making the king’s extravagant language and gestures believable. His bargain with Salome becomes a strange and lovely duet, punctuated by Herodias, urging her daughter on. He offers – and Salome refuses – half his kingdom, emeralds, pearls, opals, rare peacocks, onyx, moonstones and sapphires “big like eggs.” When the stubborn and love-crazed teenager turns down all his treasures, insisting on her grisly reward, Campbell’s breakdown is marvelous to behold. Defeated, he falls at her feet.
    Director Jackson has made some strange choices, above and beyond the sexual switches. He has set the action in 1928, reflected by Mikiko Uesugi’s stunningly simple Art Deco set design: a few chairs with the prophet’s cage at one end of the stage and that ominous moon, projected on a sheet, at the other. The palace guard Naaman (Joel Rainwater) falls upon his imaginary sword and is mysteriously resurrected a few minutes later. Courtiers light imaginary cigarettes with imaginary lighters and pour imaginary wine into imaginary goblets. Most of all – and perhaps better left to the imagination – is the head of Iokanaan. Salome cradles absolutely nothing in her hands during her final soliloquy while Anderson’s head is bowed, but obviously still firmly affixed to his neck, in the background.
    As good as the Aurora principals are, the shining star of Salome remains the words of Oscar Wilde. And the meaning of the story can be summed up in one of his famous epigrams, “There are two great tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants. The other is getting it.”