Salome
–Oscar Wilde, “De Profundis”
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But the intensity of feeling in Salome, which can exert considerable power even without Strauss’s lush music, belies Lahr’s shallow dismissal. British director Steven Berkoff’s touring revival, which played here last year, emphasized the script’s chilly dreaminess with a stylish somnambulism, evoking a 1920s silent film with its black-and-white decor and slow-mo pacing. Now, marking the 100th anniversary of Salome’s premiere (in Paris, while its author languished in an English jail for “indecent acts” of homosexuality), an off-Loop rendition affirms the work’s compelling tragic power. Eschewing effete stylization and campy irony, the Footsteps Theatre Company’s low-budget, highly charged production–powered by Dale Heinen’s sensitive direction and by acting that ranges from competent to breathtaking–proves that when the text is played straight from the heart without skeptical second-guessing, it can be mighty gripping theater.
In a program note Heinen speaks of her intention to give Salome a pre-Christian spin, linking the title character with “the great Goddess of our past [who] is still with us, although she is now veiled.” Seizing on the play’s recurrent moon imagery–it’s variously described as “a woman rising from a tomb,” a “cold and chaste…virgin,” and “a mad woman who is seeking everywhere for lovers…naked in the sky”–Heinen links the moon with Salome herself. And like the moon, Salome has phases.
Heinen’s staging doesn’t deny the dangerous humor in a script whose juxtaposition of irony, sensuality, and lyric pathos is in a way more contemporary than Wilde’s more stylistically consistent comedies of manners. (For all his seriousness of purpose, Wilde indulged in at least a few in-jokes–the “green flower” Salome offers the Syrian, for instance, is a reference to the green carnations affected by Victorian gays.) But the purgative power this production unleashes is genuinely startling–all the more considering the stringent financial and technical limitations of a small fringe company like Footsteps (“Chicago’s Premiere Women’s Theatre”). This dynamite Salome is a heartening reminder of the heights to be achieved when an off-Loop theater with imagination and guts, unhindered by the big-budget effects and shallow scripts on which too many local troupes depend, takes a strong text and gives it all it’s got.
