Oscar Wilde's "Salome' at Villanova (1st review)

Oscar Wilde's Salome is the Rodney Dangerfield of theater: it gets no respect.

The only time it was produced on Broadway— in 2003, with Marisa Tomei in the title role and Al Pacino as King Herod— Howard Kissel in the New York Daily News said that was once too often. Clive Barnes in the New York Post asked rhetorically, "Why stage Salome at all?" Asked Ben Brantley in the Times: "How can you deliver dramatic moments like Salome's kissing the decapitated head of John the Baptist without inviting hoots?" The producer apparently found the script so unplayable that he presented only a staged reading.

Those disparagements can now be dismissed. Villanova University has revealed Wilde's play for the mesmerizing theater that it is.

Banned in Britain

Wilde wrote Salome in French in 1891, in a style contrary to his witty drawing-room comedies like The Importance of Being Earnest and Lady Windermere's Fan. He was then spending more time in Paris than in London; Parisians accepted him, while Victorian society back home shunned him, indeed, later arresting and jailing him for "gross indecency." Public performances of Salome were banned in Britain for 40 years.

Wilde embraced French (and Belgian) symbolist writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Maurice Maeterlinck, whose work was marked by the musical qualities of language, dreamlike romanticism and metaphorical allusions.

Wilde constructed Salome as a piece of linguistic music. He used repetitious rhythms and recurring phrases that returned, much like Wagner's leitmotivs. Small wonder that, after failing as a play, Salome succeeded when it was adapted for opera by Richard Strauss.

Stilted Biblical language

But Salome remained distant as an opera because its libretto was in German— and even German audiences have trouble hearing the words when they're accompanied by a very large and loud orchestra.

A year after the play's premiere in Paris, an English translation was published by Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. It used archaic language similar to the King James Bible. That artificial vocabulary protectively distances and shields the audience from the drama. That may have been intentional, given the times, but it continued to be used until now.

This Villanova performance of the play communicated Wilde's vision better than any other, and I say that as one who has seen dozens of Salomes.

Credit belongs equally to Joseph Donohue's new translation and imaginative staging by Father David Cregan, as well as some captivating acting.

Colorful metaphors

Donohue, a theater historian who specializes in Irish and English drama, wrote this translation using modern speech. Donohue's version also hews more closely to Wilde's language. French has fewer root words than English, and Wilde reiterated some key words four or five times to good effect. Douglas and other translators tended to use English-language synonyms in order to avoid boredom, but that practice undermined the playwright's deliberately repetitious intent.

The spirit of Salome is epitomized in the colorful metaphors employed to describe the moon: "Look at the moon! She is like a dead woman rising from a tomb." Other characters say the moon is "like a woman looking for lovers" and "like a silver flower" and "a virgin." Sardonically, providing comic relief, Herod's wife says, "The moon is the moon. That's all."

A young Syrian page, enraptured by Salome, declares that she has feet like white doves and is like the shadow of a white rose in a mirror of silver.

Who needs veils?

Director Cregan takes this fantastical heightened speech and presents it in a stylized manner, accompanied by expressive body language and percussive musical instruments. Sometimes we hear hand-held drums; at other times the pounding of spears against the ground. We also hear Biblical chanting in Hebrew and Aramaic.

An unspoken metaphor of the play is the desire of this Biblical-era woman to rise above her subservient position. Salome achieves that goal by using sex appeal to get her way. In this production she does it by grabbing hold of red silks that seemingly hang from the sky and climbing up them. It's a display of aerial artistry that eliminates the necessity for a conventional Dance of the Seven Veils— a remarkable feat for Lizzy Pecora, who had no training in climbing, gymnastics or dancing before she was cast in this role.

Pecora portrays Salome as a headstrong and narcissistic woman who knows what she wants. Although Pecora is a graduate student apparently in her 20s, she conveys the image of a petite adolescent. Her voice is surprisingly strong as she projects the character's power, so that the audience can hear and understand every word, even when she faces upstage.

Psychologists' field day

In Wilde's telling, Salome is obsessed with Iokanaan (the prophet John the Baptist), who rejects her. Meanwhile, Salome's stepfather King Herod lusts after her, promising Salome anything if she will dance for him. At the conclusion of her dance, she asks for the head of John on a silver platter. Some of the play's most flamboyant imagery is found in Herod's description of the various treasures he'll give Salome if only she'll drop her ridiculous request for the prophet's head.

Seth Thomas Schmitt-Hall is a vivid Herod, moving like a strutting peacock and speaking in the flowery manner of a ruler accustomed to getting his way. Peter Andrew Danzig is an impressive Iokanaan and Jen Jaynes a tantalizing Herodias, Salome's mother.

The play ends sadly and hauntingly when Salome kisses the prophet's dead lips. "Iokanaan, why wouldn't you look at me? If you had looked at me [psychologists would say, "if you ever had really seen me"] you would have loved me. The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death."

Those Broadway critics were wrong. This is great theater. But then, they didn't see this production.♦


To read another review by Andrew Mangravite, click here.