Chicago Reader61%
SALOMÉ dances with the dichotomies in Oscar Wilde’s tragedy 52%
By Kerry Reid62%
7/23/2026, 4:25:56 PM
Topics: Theater Review
BS Summary: This article contains 24 faulty reasoning types, including Halo Effect, Availability Heuristic, and Negativity Bias, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 52.1% saturation with 547 hits. Analysis detected 1,742 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,050 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 51.1% and a BS Rank of 52% (10,628 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 51.40% of the article peer group.
The last time I saw Oscar Wilde’s <em>Salomé</em> on stage as a play (as opposed to Richard Strauss’s opera, which was at <a href="https://chicagoreader.com/performing-arts/theater/theater-review/salome-lyric-opera-richard-strauss-david-mcvicar/">Lyric Opera</a> this past winter) was at <a href="https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/you-know-what-they-say-about-a-woman-scorned/">Side Project in Rogers Park</a>, back in 2005 in a staging by Jimmy McDermott.
That production took a Roaring 20s approach to imagining Herod’s palace, where his unhealthy adoration of his stepdaughter and Salomé’s own obsession with Jokanaan (or John the Baptist) fit right in with an era that was all about upending old social rules and dancing between catastrophic wars.
<strong><em>SALOMÉ</em></strong><br>Through 8/2: Fri–Mon 8 PM; also Tue 7/28 and Thu 7/30 8 PM; United Church of Rogers Park, 1545 W.
Morse, <a href="http://events.humanitix.com/salome/tickets">events.humanitix.com/salome/tickets</a>, suggested donation $15-$30, masks required at all performances
Director Seph Mozes’s independent production, styled as <em>SALOMÉ</em>, also uses a Rogers Park venue.
But the sanctuary at the United Church of Rogers Park gives Wilde’s story a suitably soaring room to match the language in the play, in line with the all-caps title formatting.
It’s pretty much the only tragedy the Anglo-Irish playwright is known for—it was completed in 1891, first published in French in 1893, published in English in 1894, and first produced onstage in Paris in 1896—and one steeped in symbolism.
The biblical roots of the story are short, taking up only a few lines in the gospels of Mark and Matthew.
But the legend of the daughter of Herodias who dances for her stepfather and his generals and demands the head of John the Baptist in return has inspired artists in many mediums.
As Mozes noted last week <a href="https://chicagoreader.com/performing-arts/theater/theater-preview/salome-united-church-of-rogers-park-seph-mozes-zoe-christine-rutherford/">in an interview with Rob Silverman Ascher</a>, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1964 film, <em>The Gospel According to Saint Matthew</em>, was one of the things he thought about in crafting his interpretation.
As I wrote about the Side Project production, “<em>Salomé</em> may not be the best play Wilde ever wrote, but it is assuredly the most unfettered.”
Wild flights of similes abound, particularly when the princess sees the imprisoned Jokanaan for the first time.
“Thy body is white like the lilies of a field that the mower hath never mowed.
Thy body is white like the snows that lie on the mountains.”
But when spurned by Jokanaan, the princess changes her tune in a heartbeat.
“Thy body is hideous.
It is like the body of a leper.
It is like a plastered wall where vipers have crawled.”
(His eyes and his hair receive similar backlash treatment from her.)
It can be difficult to play the shifts in Salomé’s temperament without falling into the unintentionally comic.
But in Zoë Christine Rutherford’s incendiary and hypnotic performance, the shifts somehow work, showing us the tensions between the girl and the woman caught in one body.
(In reality, Salomé was probably no older than 14 when her stepfather’s unnatural attraction to her led to the fatal dance.)
Rutherford is a trans woman, which perhaps adds an extra element to viewing Wilde’s Salomé as not being completely accepted in the court of her stepfather.
She is spoiled, but also ignored; treated as a plaything by the king, but also viewed as a source of danger and sin.
She is othered and ostracized, desired and derided, wooed and weaponized.
When Philip Aman’s Herod asks her to give “a bite of your little teeth” to a strawberry he holds out to her, it’s a clear sign of the grooming he’s subjected her to.
The marriage of Herodias to her late husband’s brother, with the child of her earlier marriage caught in the middle, of course also has elements of Gertrude and Claudius in <em>Hamlet</em>.
The marriage is called out as sinful and incestuous by Jokanaan (Felix Flores, defiant and determined as a prophet must be), who also calls the princess “a daughter of Sodom.”
But Salomé cannot seek revenge on her own.
She can only enact her own desire for vengeance (spurred on by Herodias, played with steely and vampish assurance by Kelly Anchors) through using others as instruments.
The theme of turning other people into instruments of lust and violence recurs throughout the 90 minutes of the story, with Aman’s Herod most clearly the villain, all the more terrible for his perfectly mundane costume of dress shirt, trousers, and suspenders.
(Costume designer Annie Sommer-Kaufman’s work brings modern-dress flair to the characters, as well as practicality to the billowy gold-and-white gown that Rutherford strips out of during the “dance of the seven veils.”)
The tragedy of the play isn’t just about Salomé and Jokanaan.
There is also a young captain (Alberto Arizmendi) whose obsession with the princess drives him to take his own life.
Fionn Casper-Strauss’s page, as stoic and silent as Rutherford’s princess is histrionic and kinetic, stands with blood on his face, a stark reminder of his dead friend throughout the play.
For his part, Herod just worries about slipping on the blood from the dead man himself, or having Salomé dance barefoot in it.
It’s an effective reminder of how the passions and peccadilloes of the rich and powerful redound to those lower down the social hierarchy.
The high ceiling of the church sanctuary, featuring a single white domed light high above, makes an excellent stand-in for the many references to the sky and the moon scattered throughout.
The central carpeted aisle makes a sort of profane fashion runway for Rutherford’s dance.
The actor, who also performs as a drag artist under the name <a href="https://www.instagram.com/delta__badhand/">Delta Badhand</a>, knows how to challenge and invite us into the performance at the same time.
We watch, not sure if we are complicit in a child’s victimization or witnesses to a young woman claiming what measure of power and agency she can.
“They say that love has a bitter taste,” says Salomé right before the end of the play.
Obviously Wilde himself would come to know the bitterness of love through his downfall, precipitated by his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas (who translated <em>Salomé</em> into English) that ended with Wilde going to prison.
“Each man kills the thing he loves,” Wilde wrote in “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”
Mozes’s adept handling of the tricky emotional shadings in <em>SALOMÉ</em> and the grandeur of the church setting make this production well worth seeing, particularly for Wilde fans.
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100%flagged-word coverageZoë Christine Rutherford
27 attributed words18% of attributed speech95% writer coverage
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