Another ‘Salome’ will flow freely outdoors

THERE’S the “Salome” everybody is talking about -- you know, the production of the Oscar Wilde play that will open Thursday at the Wadsworth Theatre, starring Al Pacino and directed by Estelle Parsons. It’s a staged reading, duplicating a 2003 Broadway production that was developed at the august Actors Studio in New York.

Then there’s the other “Salome” -- not by Wilde, but definitely something of a theatrical wild card.

On May 24 and 25, the Cherry and Martin art gallery in West Los Angeles will use its outdoor stage to present the U.S. premiere of Charles L. Mee Jr.’s “Salome,” directed by Matthew Wilder and with Amanda Decker portraying Salome.

Mee wrote numerous plays, including “A Perfect Wedding,” which opened to mostly positive reviews at Culver City’s Kirk Douglas Theatre in 2004. Wilder has directed several examples of the Mee oeuvre, including the premieres of “The War to End War” at Sledgehammer Theater in San Diego and “Songs of Joy and Destitution” at L.A.’s Open Fist Theatre.

Cherry and Martin co-owner Mary Leigh Cherry says that Wilder approached the gallery with the idea for the “Salome” and that Mee’s reputation for the quirky seemed to mesh nicely with the gallery’s May 13 to June 17 exhibitions.

Cherry says she was particularly intrigued by playwright Mee’s website, www.charlesmee.com, which, through Mee’s “(re)making project,” invites visitors to “feel free to take the plays from this website and use them freely as a resource for your own work: that is to say, don’t just make some cuts or rewrite a few passages or rearrange them or put in a few texts that you like better, but pillage the plays as I have pillaged the structures and contents of the plays of Euripides and Brecht and stuff out of Soap Opera Digest and the evening news and the internet, and build your own, entirely new, piece -- and then, please, put your own name to the work that results.”

The posting adds that if you are performing a play as Mee wrote it, you need to clear your production with his agent at ICM.

“I was intrigued by that kind of dialogue between theater and performance art,” Cherry says.

Diane Haithman