Chicago Reader21%
Getting Wilde with SALOMÉ 14%
By Rob Silverman Ascher11%
7/16/2026, 5:20:23 PM
Topics: Theater Preview
BS Summary: This article contains 38 faulty reasoning types, including Indoctrination, False Dilemma, and Optimism Bias, with Hasty Generalization as the most egregious example at 9.2% saturation with 322 hits. Analysis detected 3,511 faulty-reasoning hits from 3,486 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 30.7% and a BS Rank of 14% (16,508 of 19,035 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 86.70% of the article peer group.
In an introduction to Lord Alfred Douglasʼs English translation of Oscar Wilde's Salomé, his friend Robbie Ross shared Wilde's apparent belief that the play was “a mirror in which everyone could see himself.
The artist, art; the dull, dullness; the vulgar, vulgarity.”
Since its publication in 1893, Wilde’s story of desire and political will has been rendered as a a 1905 opera by Richard Strauss ( Lyric Opera produced it in January of this year) and a 1978 ballet by Danish choreographer Flemming Flindt, as well as being filmed several times (including Ken Russell's 1988 film, Salomé's Last Dance).
Chicago-based director Seph Mozes is bringing his staging, SALOMÉ, to the sanctuary of United Church of Rogers Park (UCRP) this weekend.
This modern dress production, featuring Zoë Christine Rutherford (aka Delta Badhand) in the lead role, is notable for Rutherford's casting, as she is the first trans actress to play Salomé.
I sat down with Mozes and Rutherford in UCRPʼs annex during a torrential thunderstorm to talk about audience gazes, Wilde's language, and the religious iconography at play in SALOMÉ.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
SALOMÉ
7/19-8/2: Fri-Mon 8 PM; also Tue 7/28 and Thu 7/30 8 PM; United Church of Rogers Park, 1545 W.
Morse, events.humanitix.com/salome/tickets, suggested donation $15-$30; masks required at all performances
Rob Silverman Ascher: Seph, what brought you to producing SALOMÉ?
Seph Mozes: I first got interested in it in college.
I really felt it was like nothing that I had ever encountered before.
[Wilde’s language] has a sort of hypnotic quality.
And so, it really stuck in my mind as something I would love to do.
Then last year, I did Bad Behavior [by Richard Foreman] at United Church of Rogers Park, and I got to see the sanctuary, this incredibly beautiful, grand space.
And I was thinking, “What show would be worthy of that space?”
And I thought of SALOMÉ.
And then, I thought I would need an actress.
Zoë Christine Rutherford: I auditioned for Bad Behavior.
I knew it wasn't the right show for me, but I just wanted to flex those muscles again, and I had a really good time.
Seph reached out to say, "Not this project, but I loved what you did."
And we just kept running into each other.
I have a love of this show partially because of my background as an evangelical pastor's daughter.
Some framework that my mom used to always give to biblical women's stories really impacts my look at this show.
Mozes: Wait, can you tell me more about what your mom said about biblical stories?
Rutherford: My mom would get to preach every once in a while.
I grew up in an Assemblies of God, evangelical church.
We don't hold the snakes, but our cousins used to.
I remember that my mom, in her own Y2K feminist way, when she got her opportunity to preach, would say things like, "Adam was there when Eve ate the fruit, by the way," and things like that.
I always appreciated her way of humanizing the women in the Bible and in biblical stories, regardless of whether their actions were on-face good or evil.
The text that this play is derived from is really, like, maybe four verses.
There’s not much to pull from, and the text doesn’t give Salomé a lot of agency.
It really says that she does what her mother tells her to do.
It describes her as “daughter of,” and not as her own person.
Ascher: With the character of Salomé at the center of this symbolist work of Wilde’s, how do you balance being true to the psychology with a kind of purposely broad character?
Mozes: I think it's interesting this is kind of the only symbolist play that people still do.
And it's because it succeeds both as a poetic text and as a dramatic story, right?
I think that's a really fun place to dig into, because it means that you have the opportunity to serve this poetic text and let the text speak for itself.
Also, there is enough depth there that you can be grounded in the real emotional stakes of the story.
Rutherford: It's funny for me because I don't think that I'm playing a broad archetype.
I think I'm painting with broad strokes, but I think ultimately my goal is to celebrate the text while lawyering for the character.
Salomé as an archetypal princess, or an archetype of lust personified, or whatever it is for people—that's so much more about the audience's understanding of the character than it is about the human who is, of course, speaking in heightened language who I want to honor.
Ascher: Seph, this reminds me of some of the conversations we had when you were doing the Gertrude Stein plays [Mozes directed short plays by Stein at Facility Theatre in 2025] about relationships between text and image as well as text and sound.
Are you approaching this similarly to how you approached Stein?
Mozes: It's really different in that Wilde has a lot more specific of an idea of what you're supposed to do with it.
This is the third independent production that I've done.
I did Stein, and then I did Richard Foreman, and now I'm doing this, and I feel like with all three of those, the plays are by artists who have a specific enough vision that I feel like I can wrestle with them.
I don't feel like I have to work too hard to be delicate with the text because it stands up so well on its own.
It's really important to not deliver it like you're delivering poetry, but to deliver it as much as possible with intention and feeling and let the audience hear the poetry for themselves.
The actors aren't miked, and the church has this really intense echo.
So, the actors have to speak pretty slowly.
I'm interested in how that emulates 19th-century theater, delivering text with the resonance of the space in mind, and that there's this declamatory quality to it.
But also, acting styles have changed a lot in the last 150 years, so we have to serve the text and let it be heard by the audience while also trying our best to make it feel like it's naturally coming out of the feeling that the actors are having.
Rutherford: My favorite thing that I did professionally when I was acting full time was outdoor Shakespeare.
This feels like such a return to that.
It is raw and emotional and vulnerable, but you have to truly play it for the angels.
Zoë Christine Rutherford: "I hope that I'm playing her as a truly embodied woman who is genuinely doing the best she can given her circumstances, and sometimes the best you can do is the worst you can do."
Ascher: What is the aesthetic approach of this production?
For example, the Lyric Opera's recent production was very focused on Italian fascist aesthetics.
What are you aiming for here?
Mozes: We are setting it in the present.
I have this feeling that you should always set plays in the present if you can, because it creates less translation work for the audience.
So, we are trying to think about it in the time and space that we are doing it as much as possible.
When I was talking to Annie [Sommer Kaufman], our costume designer, about this, she was really excited about all the gorgeous Art Nouveau aesthetics, and I [said], "Totally, that stuff is beautiful!
And we are not doing that."
A lot of people have done SALOMÉ as a spectacle really well.
What if we just do it as a normal play, and try to make the stakes of the actual circumstances as real for the audience as possible?
In terms of the costumes and the props and everything, I think we're really interested in, like, this is a king/rich powerful guy who is trying to get his niece/stepdaughter to do a dance for him in front of all of his rich and powerful friends.
And can we make that actual circumstance believable and present to the audience?
Ascher: As far as research shows, you are the first trans actor to play Salomé.
How do you see yourself as a trans woman in playing Salomé?
Is your Salomé trans?
Is she cis?
Or does it not matter?
Do you try to work the inherent politics into the portrayal?
Rutherford: First and foremost, the first line of the play is, "How beautiful is the Princess Salomé tonight?"
And there are at least, like, 20, 25 variations of that line, and I think there's something very powerful to be any woman in that space, but especially to be the first trans woman.
So I really hope that I am able to embody and feel that in a way that is completely apparent to the audience.
I think that's very powerful.
It's really fun because I find myself in this interesting position where this role has such a rich history of being performed by powerful queer women.
This play was essentially written for Sarah Bernhardt.
It was submitted to her in French.
[A planned production in London starring Bernhardt was shut down during rehearsals by the Lord Chamberlain because of a rule prohibiting the depiction of biblical characters onstage.]
There's also Alla Nazimova.
[Nazimova self-produced a 1923 film version.]
I think it's very interesting that I joined this legacy of queer women who are working on independent productions of this play.
To answer the question directly, I don't know how important it is that my Salomé is trans, as opposed to what we can get from the text, that she's a young woman who is budding.
As a trans woman, I approach every role with my own experience in mind.
I do think it's very fun to get to play a trans woman who is in a seat of power, with a lot of money, and a lot of ignorance.
I am a young trans woman who is embodying her and hopefully doing her justice.
But the given circumstances of the text take precedence here in a way.
Ascher: To that point, the way that Salomé exercises her power is an inversion of how female power is portrayed in a lot of biblical stories.
Rutherford: I don't want to reveal too much of this.
But I think I figured out the secret of the play.
And I've talked a little bit with Seph about it.
But I've decided that I think it's almost important that I keep it to myself.
It's important that every actress has a secret.
Mozes: What I will say is that, whenever an actor has asked a question which is like, "Am I thinking two steps ahead?"—the answer is always no in this production.
I think none of these characters are really scheming toward anything.
They are all acting impulsively and foolishly.
And that's a kind of tragedy I'm more interested in than one about people who have stuff planned out ahead of time.
Rutherford: It's not chess, but it is a very complicated game of checkers with a lot of given circumstances.
It's also interesting to think about it in terms of female power, because even though Salomé does hold a lot of state power, she is also a highly sexually abused girl.
This is a girl who holds as much power as she does, insomuch as no one says no to her, but she cannot leave her home.
She can't freely enter the world as a citizen.
She is essentially an animal in a cage.
She may be a rich girl who has state power, but it is an act of state violence, not giving a person agency over where their life goes, and to give them full power and permission to do anything.
Ascher: The way she talks to and about Jokanaan [the John the Baptist figure in the play] is kind of a nexus of that.
Rutherford: We've talked a little bit about that.
For me, it's imperative that those feelings are genuine, and that they're coming from a real place within her.
But I do think it is very indicative of the language that she's heard used to describe herself.
Mozes: One of the things we've been thinking about, as I think is maybe true for a lot of tragedies, is it's a completely different play depending on whose perspective you're looking at it from.
I initially loved how morally ambiguous it is.
Salomé is both a victim and someone who kills someone else, right?
And that's how it is in real life, right?
Violence is always multidirectional.
I think what we're interested in is that Salomé is neither a villainess nor is she totally innocent of the blood that's ultimately on her hands.
Rutherford: She’s in difficult circumstances, and unable to act thoughtfully enough to prevent something terrible from happening.
I feel very strongly for this poor little girl who’s in a really, really tough spot.
I hope that I'm playing her as a truly embodied woman who is genuinely doing the best she can given her circumstances, and sometimes the best you can do is the worst you can do.
Ascher: Speaking of archetypes, there is a deeply racist, Orientalist framing that a lot of people bring to it.
Mozes: It is Orientalist.
There's no way around that.
But our approach is to try to set it in the present, and in an American cultural idiom, as much as possible.
The biblical setting and all the regional references in the play are really not the point of the emotional content of the story.
I really feel like it's just a story about power, and not taking the bait of using those images allows you to actually see the story for what it is.
Rutherford: It's really funny to strip Wilde of aesthetic.
Ascher: Seph, I also wanted to talk a bit about SALOMÉ as this story about Jews that's blasted through this very Christian lens.
As a Jewish theatermaker who spends a lot of time with Torah and Talmud, have you brought some distancing to it, or is that part of what is intriguing to you about the text?
Mozes: I'm really not thinking about it as a Jewish story, because it really is a Christian story.
The characters are nominally Jews, but nothing about the content has anything to do with Jews culturally.
So I'm really thinking about it as a story about a corrupt puppet king inside of an empire.
On the one hand, it's not really about Jews, because it's not written by a Jew, and it's not really interested in Jews as a culture.
On the other hand, it is about these incredibly overdetermined Christian historical references.
I've been thinking about [Pier Paolo] Pasolini's Jesus movie [1964's The Gospel According to St.
Matthew] a lot.
Using stories that you assume the audience already has some familiarity with allows you to go further and say something new.
Politically, it's important to me to think about state power as something that is equally violent no matter who's wielding it.
That's true across time and space, including when it's Jews.
A Jewish king is the same as any other kind of king.
Any kind of king is someone who people don't say no to, and so he does terrible, violent things to women and people in his power.
We are doing this show during the Three Weeks of the Jewish calendar when we commemorate the sieges of Jerusalem and destruction of the [First and Second] Temples by the Babylonian and Roman empires.
So it’s a good time to be doing a tragedy about how imperial power is a death cult.
Ascher: We’re talking about how people bring their assumptions to Salomé, both the character and the play.
Going back to the apparent Wilde quote, what do you want people to see in this?
Mozes: Some people are familiar in some way with the play, and so for those people, I would love for them to see it without all of the kitsch that has accumulated around it.
I would like audiences to feel like it's a real story that they can understand and can imagine happening.
I'm interested in escaping the question of, “Is a woman coming into her power and then using that to hurt someone else good or evil?”
I think Wilde was thinking beyond good and evil.
This is a tragedy in which every individual character's perspective makes sense, but when combined, leads to terrible violence.
I've been really interested in analogizing what Jokanaan says as being more political instead of religious.
That story is just as important as the story of a young woman who is trapped and who is coming into realizing her power in a way that she didn't know she could.
Both of those stories are equally interesting, and they're both happening at the same time.
That's what's so cool about tragedy, that each of these characters has their own story, and the stories are incompatible, and the chemical reaction of those stories makes something happen.
Seph Mozes: "I think Wilde was thinking beyond good and evil.
This is a tragedy in which every individual character's perspective makes sense, but when combined, leads to terrible violence."
Rutherford: Hopefully, again, people come in with a lot of baggage and preconceived notions about the character and the play.
I'm hoping to ideally recontextualize some of those.
I hope it's an enjoyable experience.
Sitting through a tragedy is not fun, so I hope that it is an artful and beautiful piece.
But also I hope that people walk away with a respect for where she is and what she's trying to accomplish.
I think this play, when read through Salomé's eyes, is very, very hopeful until the last few moments.
I really hope that people walk away with a moral ambiguity.
Second, I really hope the audience walks away understanding Salomé not only as temptress, not only as seductress, not only as femme fatale, though she definitely is these things.
But I hope that, above and beyond that, they understand the complications of her as a fatherless princess who no longer believes in miracles in the Roman empire at the dawn of Christianity.
Mozes: It's a lot about looking.
And Salomé is someone who is looked at and who suddenly discovers her ability to look at and see someone else.
That's one of the things that is interesting to think about in a trans context.
Salomé is someone who everyone has this both violent and desirous obsession with looking at who is then able to turn the gaze around a little bit.
I think for people who are coming to the play for the first time, something to track is, who is looking at whom?
Rutherford: I hope that the audience does walk away with a sense of what the cis male gaze sometimes feels like to trans women.
Mozes: Rosemary Wexler, our lighting designer, said this thing that has been really useful, which is that the moon is a big recurring theme in the play, and the moon is like a searchlight.
There’s this kind of harsh, aggressive light that is being shown on people that they're at various points trying to hide from.
The way light works here is that darkness is safe and light is dangerous because light means that the gaze is being pointed at you.
This has made me think about how most of the characters, particularly Salomé, aren't really interested in attention.
They don't really want to be seen, but they do use being seen toward getting something else that they want, even though being seen comes with danger.
Ascher: I want to talk a little more about performing this play, which is set at the dawn of Christendom, in a sanctuary that has massive crucifixes flanking the space.
Mozes: It's fun to do it in an actual Christian space.
I haven't ever wanted us to have a kind of ironic distance from the religious content of the play.
It's a mistake to not think about Wilde as a Christian writer.
I think he does find real beauty and power in Christianity.
And UCRP is a really special institution.
They take being a church for gay and trans people really seriously.
And it's an honor that they are letting us do this complicated and not straightforwardly affirming piece of queer art in their space.
I take religion seriously, and I take it seriously that this play is about the possibility of goodness under violent circumstances.
Rutherford: And I'll say for me, as the transsexual daughter of evangelical ministers, it's very fun to get to take my clothes off in a sanctuary.
I'm having a good time with that.
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