A ‘Salome’ to Go Wild Over

There is no one like David Schweizer. In a new production of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” at the Actors’ Gang, the director spectacularly solves this problem play where many before him have crashed and burned. Schweizer transforms the play from a turgid curiosity into his own unmistakable antic vision, ridiculous and passionate, poetical and fierce. Even at its most burlesque--a quality for which Wilde was not particularly known--Schweizer’s “Salome” remains surprisingly true to Wilde’s aesthetics and to his sense of tragedy.

“Salome” is Wilde’s take on the biblical tale of the princess spurned by John the prophet. When her lascivious stepfather, King Herod, begs her to dance for him, Salome demands John’s head on a silver platter as payment. Then Salome finally takes the kiss that John would not give her in life.

Wilde has said that he liked his comedy “intensely modern” and his tragedy “to walk in purple.” As translated by the humorless Lord Alfred Douglas (Wilde wrote the play in French in 1892), his “Salome” is indeed lurid, and it is not overtly modern or funny. Schweizer employs a seldom-performed translation, from poet Richard Howard, which is both cleaner and campier, and which allows the director to be both purple and intensely modern. The story of Salome is filled with nuttiness, and Schweizer floods it, most fittingly, with his own buoyant excess.

While the audience files in, a soldier (Brent Hinkley) sits, lost in an erotic dream, smiling idiotically and fondling his breast plate. It is a weird and discomforting image, half wild parody, half private moment. He is watching, it turns out, the beautiful Salome (Tordy Clark) having dinner with her stepfather Herod (V.J. Foster), her mother Herodias (Patti Tippo) and visitors. Once the entire entourage gets onto the stage, the abundance of bizarre personas is almost overwhelming.

Two bearded Talmudic Jews, sharing one gown, furiously debate with the two arms they have between them. Three slaves (Ken Palmer, Don Cummings, Gabriel Sigal) wear spiked hair, red dog collars and tiny red flaps over their private parts, and they fetch and carry and cringe extravagantly. Should they get in the way of Herod, played by Foster as an omni-sexual, over-bred aesthete in a Medusa wig, they will get swatted like flies. Standing nearby, two soldiers (Greg White and Ken Elliott), wearing more makeup than armor, react wildly to every occurrence. The shrewish Herodias looks like a showgirl performing a Las Vegas tribute to serpents.

“Salome” absorbs over-the-top acting like a sponge. With the invaluable help of costumer Salvatore Salamone (suspicious name, that), everyone--from the lowliest, cringing servant to the King of Judea--reaches some deeply strange place within themselves. At times “Salome” is a hullabaloo--and what you are laughing at will be different from what your neighbor is laughing at. But when Schweizer wants attention focused on, say, Salome’s fearsome pout, all eyes will be glued there.

Foster’s Herod is sublime. At first he is a Caligula, whose kohl-lined eyes seem to offer only bottomless debasement, with a lewd look for every slave that crosses his path. But he is also genuinely royal. He has the sense to recognize impending tragedy and tries, quite admirably and poetically, to talk Salome out of her obstinate desire to see the head of the prophet John. He effortlessly straddles the comic and tragic when, wearing a see-through gown and lace-up high-heeled sandals, he leans toward her, pleading: “I’ve always been reasonable with you. . . .”

His relationship with Salome, the beguiling Clark, is as complex as it is absurdly funny. She is a gamin with cropped hair and gorgeous, movie-star eyes, a petulant stepdaughter who despises the king and yet poses with her legs spread in front of him; a sultry, intelligent, passionate woman whose desire for John the prophet is palpable. She reminds us that this story of self-immolating love--Wilde’s story, too--is not as faraway as it might seem. Schweizer’s genius is that he finds truth in his camp, as surely as Wilde found refuge in his art.

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* “Salome,” the Actors’ Gang, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood, Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends March 7. $15. (213) 660-TKTS. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.