Playwright: Oscar Wilde. At: National Pastime Theater in the Old Speakeasy, 4139 N. Broadway. Phone: 773-327-7077;$20. Runs through: Aug. 6
Scholars can gloss over many of the Bible’s racier chapters, but there’s no censoring the lurid circumstances surrounding the untimely death of a top New Testament celebrity. Consider its premise: King Herod, who has assumed rule over Judea after committing regicide on his brother and marrying the latter’s widow, now lusts after his teenage niece, Salomé, who prefers to flirt with the street preacher temporarily detained in the palace dungeon for slandering the royal family. When Iokanaan—nom de drame of the scriptures’ John the Baptist—spurns her advances, she offers to perform an erotic dance for her uncle’s party guests, afterward demanding as her reward the prisoner’s severed head.
As if this wasn’t steamy enough, Oscar Wilde—Victorian London’s poster-boy for the so-called “fleshly school of poetry”—embellishes his account of the events with description heaping the sensual upon the already sensational. The play opens with servants loitering on the terrace, eavesdropping on the revels and gleefully anticipating scandal erupting before the night’s end. Later, Salomé croons amorously to the Caravaggio-esque prophet, who is then forced to physically repel his seducer. Herod ogles his nymphet stepchild through a haze of priapic sweat during the ecstatic corybanting that is her “Dance of the Seven Veils”, and when its perpetrator names her fee, the catalogue of riches the reluctant monarch offers her in its place conjures word-pictures to intoxicate our verbal sensibilities.
The artists of National Pastime Theater are long acclimated to the risks of fitting epic spectacle to the close quarters of the Old Speakeasy’s storefront. Fortunately, director Laurence Bryan and his designers have looked to Aubrey Beardley’s contemporary illustrations for their visual cues: Joe Loffing’s shadowy lighting and JJ Porterfield’s evocative sound design lend an atmosphere of cosmic mystery to a wholly-integrated stage picture reflecting conceptual unity rarely seen on the off-loop circuit. The actors likewise immerse themselves in the formal rigor of their ancient world—even as Joshua Harris and Rebecca Wolfe bare it all in service of their personae—to render Wilde’s flowery speech at once accessible and ornamental, generating tension and suspense culminating in the grisly climax when simmering passions burst forth in a triumph of obsessive desire.
Salomé is the centerpiece of National Pastime’s annual Naked July: Art Stripped Down festival, whose 2011 roster includes the Living Canvas dancers, the Beast Women vaudeville troupe, weekly midnight film showings, a gallery exhibit and a lobby bar serving “Naked Grape” wine.