May 1, 2003

Veils or No Veils, Whatever She Wants She Gets

here's not one veil in sight, let alone seven. But for once, Salome's mythic dance is effective in exactly the right way: sexy as all get-out and thoroughly demoralizing.

It is hard not to identify with that old lecher who's been watching her, frozen, through a haze of red light, looking like the ultimate tired businessman. "Wonderful," he says proprietarily, with a Yiddish lilt, at the dance's conclusion. But you can tell this voyeuristic episode has taken a lot out of him.

The old lecher is a king, Herod by name. And in the smashing new production of Oscar Wilde's "Salome," which opened last night at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, Herod is portrayed by Al Pacino, a specialist in thugs at the top, as a soul encased in the armor of jadedness that comes from years of exercising ruthless power. He is also, however, a man who can be betrayed into visible discomfort, at least momentarily, by his own appetites.

As for the princess Salome, she is played by another Oscar winner, Marisa Tomei, as an untouched Lolita just beginning to appreciate the power she commands over men. When she dances, she begins self-consciously, experimentally undulating her thighs and exposed midriff. Then by degrees, she succumbs to a gyrating, autoerotic frenzy that chills even as it generates heat.

Toward the end of preview performances, Ms. Tomei was reported to be so caught up in the moment that she tore off the top of her costume. This didn't happen when I saw the show, but it wasn't necessary. You still had a feeling that this was something you perhaps had no right to be watching. Which is entirely appropriate to a play in which people are forever admonishing one another not to look at the objects of their desire. And in which it is said that what is seen in the mirror may be the only image to be trusted.

"Salome: The Reading," directed by Estelle Parsons, was developed at the Actors Studio and previously staged in Brooklyn and Poughkeepsie, N.Y. The version that opened last night, which also stars David Strathairn and Dianne Wiest, shows the careful collaboration and textual excavation associated with the venerable studio.

But theatergoers expecting 110 minutes of teeth-gritting kitchen-sink naturalism — in the manner of famous studio graduates like Brando, De Niro and (yes) Pacino — are in for a shock. What Ms. Parsons and company have devised is a strange, shrewdly stylized interpretation of Wilde's densely lyrical text that would seem more suitable to an experimental theater downtown than to Broadway, where plays often look and feel the way they did 50 years ago.

But while the cast members of "Salome" may not be going for strictly lifelike effects, they're not stinting on feeling. Transforming the play's biblical royals, toadies and men of religion into gargoyles of contemporary archetypes, they find both a scary emotional intensity and a pitch-black sense of humor. In doing so, they make Wilde's most arcane theatrical work feel as luridly immediate as this morning's tabloids.

Written originally in French in 1891, with the idea of Sarah Bernhardt in the title role, "Salome" is by far the hardest of Wilde's plays to bring to credible life. He was then besotted with French Symbolist poetry, and "Salome" is more than anything a chain of glittering images and metaphors that reflect off one another. (Wilde's less than realistic approach to staging is summed up by his suggestion that there be perfume-dispensing censers in the orchestra pit to signal changes of mood.)

To speak the purple dialogue in the ringing heroic tones "Salome" would seem to demand would turn the play into camp. And really, how can you deliver dramatic moments like Salome's kissing the decapitated head of John the Baptist without inviting hoots? As for that dance of the seven veils, even Rita Hayworth couldn't pull it off (in a 1953 movie, not taken from Wilde).

A 1992 New York version, which also featured Mr. Pacino as Herod, had critics in amused awe of its star's eccentric performance, but the show was largely dismissed as a mess. Three years later Steven Berkoff imported an English production to the Brooklyn Academy of Music that was an ice-cold slow-motion rhapsody in black and white that brought to mind a German silent movie. The Actors Studio stakes out its own twilight territory between a full physical staging and its self-described status as a reading. There are music stands artfully arranged on the Barrymore stage, and the performers do carry scripts, at least some of the time. But you get the sense that they know their lines as well as they do their phone numbers. And their performances have the rhythmic assurance of thoroughly rehearsed vocal parts in an oratorio.

The pretense of the production as a reading has important advantages, though. It avoids the impossible responsibility of creating a set to match Wilde's fantastical language. And it means that the performers don't have to address one another directly in words that are hard, to put it mildly, to justify as spontaneous conversation. Instead, set off by the ominous, whispery music of Yukio Tsuji and the jewel-toned lighting of Howard Thies, the characters mostly speak to the audience.

This is appropriate to a play in which vision, it is suggested, is as much of a creation of the mind and the loins as the eye. In the show's opening moments, a young Syrian guard (Chris Messina) sets the tone as, gaze fixed on some ambiguous horizon, he rhapsodizes about Salome, that princess who "has little white doves for feet."

Not an easy thing to say with a straight face, is it? Mr. Messina delivers his paeans at a high monotonal pitch, like a mooning adolescent. And his voice makes you aware of the painful gap between pretty words and gut feelings. It is an idea that will be explored in nearly every performance that follows.

As Herodias, Herod's wife and Salome's mother, the tuxedo-clad Ms. Wiest has the straight-backed carriage and stentorian tones of someone born to public life, streaked with a testy impatience with her less patrician husband. Playing the prophet Jokanaan (a k a John the Baptist), Mr. Strathairn has the pale, wild-eyed look of Bob Dylan at his most visionary and an artificially enhanced voice that could peel flesh. And the production wittily summons the gallery of soldiers as a wary chorus and the court's visiting diplomats as a squabbling United Nations.

But the show is at its most inspired in its presentation of Herod and Salome as different sides of the same expensive coin. Ms. Tomei, a Salome in a runaway state of sexual awakening, looks lithe-bodied and luscious, and she speaks with the petulant breathiness of a 1950's starlet. Mr. Pacino, his stomach straining against his black dress shirt, looks bleary and bloated and talks in the weary, high-pitched singsong of a man who is long accustomed to people hanging on his every word.

For all their surface differences, they are both spoiled monsters, creatures of vast appetites used to getting exactly what they want. Both Herod and Salome have a habit here of letting their tongues stray out of their mouths, as if in anticipation of tastes to come.

The plot of the play of course hinges on two specific wants: Salome wants to kiss the head of Jokanaan; Herod wants to see Salome dance. It's that simple. And that complicated. Watching these two pursue their appetites makes this "Salome" a luxuriously and disturbingly entertaining illustration of a dictum well known to people of power of all ages: Be careful what you wish for.

OSCAR WILDE'S 'SALOME'
The Reading

Directed by Estelle Parsons; music by Yukio Tsuji; sets by Peter Larkin; costumes by Jane Greenwood; lighting by Howard Thies; sound by Erich Bechtel and David Schnirman; general management, Nina Lannan Associates; production stage manager, Alan Fox; technical supervisors, Theatersmith and James Maloney. Presented by Robert Fox, Daryl Roth and Amy Nederlander. At the Ethel Barrymore Theater, 243 West 47th Street, Manhattan.

WITH: Al Pacino (Herod Antipas), Marisa Tomei (Salome), David Strathairn (Jokanaan), Dianne Wiest (Herodias) and Chris Messina (the Young Syrian).