Salome
“Of course, I plagiarize,” Oscar Wilde once told Max Beerbohm. “It is the privilege of the appreciative.” In Salome the master of drawing-room comedy borrowed freely from a variety of sources, including the Gospels of Matthew and Mark and Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1889 play La Princesse Maleine. The play that resulted is perhaps the most idiosyncratic and least understood of Wilde’s works—and one of the least produced. (More people have probably seen or heard Richard Strauss’s opera or seen Aubrey Beardsley’s famous woodcuts for the play’s 1894 published edition.) Salome was never performed in England during Wilde’s lifetime. In a harbinger of his ultimate clash with the morality police, he was refused a license to produce the play on the grounds that no work depicting biblical characters could be staged. The decision so enraged him that he threatened to renounce his English citizenship and go live in France—a threat that, sadly, he didn’t carry out.
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Salome may not be the best play Wilde ever wrote, but it is assuredly the most unfettered: its perfumed poetry and high-flown images do seem better suited to opera. The work teems with similes: the moon is variously described as looking like “a woman rising from the tomb,” “a little piece of money,” and “a little silver flower,” while terrible portents present themselves in a sound like the “beating of giant wings.” In this Side Project production the much-celebrated moon, represented by a crescent painted on the wall, looks like a semicircle of razor wire—which, for a play about the ways in which our appetites destroy the things we love, is wholly appropriate.
Salome is not the only famous female onstage at the Side Studio. In When Women Wore Wings, a collection of seven monologues, four playwrights present eight daring women, ranging from real-life heroines of flight Amelia Earhart and Christa McAuliffe to fairy-tale princesses Snow White and Rapunzel to the much maligned Medusa and Medea and the mother of us all, Eve.
When: Through 3/20: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM
When Women Wore Wings
