Out Lines – Episode 4

Episode Transcript

[ music ]

Jay Thomas as Bill: It’s supposed to be the moon.

Chris Weikel as Lane: Ms. Salome is no kid.

Virginia Baeta as The Actress/Salome: I am a nameless woman.

Jordan Schildcrout: An ingenue with teeth.

Karen Stanion as Gladys: Something tingling with excitement is about to take place.

[ music ]

VB: Welcome to Out Lines, the show were three triple threats dig into fascinating texts from the LGBTQ theater canon for the revelations waiting for us between the lines.

Mark Finley: I’m Mark Finley, director, playwright and Artistic Director of TOSOS.

JS: I’m Jordan Schildcrout, dramaturg, scholar, and author.

VB: And I’m Virginia Beata, actor, playwright and person prepared to make you an offer you can’t refuse. Get it? Threat? Triple… Never mind.

JS: This season, we’re excavating Doric Wilson’s Now She Dances! You can find the full text of the play along with our real bios and other scintillating supporting stuff at outlinespod.com. We spent the last couple of episodes walking through the first act of the play.

MF: In today’s episode, we wrap up the play’s first act and dig into some background on the titular “She,” the notorious Salome.

Christopher Borg as Herod: Now she dances!

JS: All in good time.

[ music ]

MF: When we last left Now She Dances! Herod had run off in pursuit of the flier-pushing pervert and Gladys had exited to find some dusting to do.

CW as Lane: Lane finishes his on-set stage manager duties and exits, taking the costume rack with him…

JT as Bill: Leaving Bill on stage to finish hanging lanterns and then…

KS as Gladys: Pssst.

JT as Bill: Me?

KS as Gladys: Lane did it.

JT as Bill: Did what?

KS as Gladys: Lane is the man with the ink-stained hand.

JT as Bill: You mean he’s the sodo-whatchamacallit?

KS as Gladys: He used an alias.

JT as Bill: Lane?

KS as Gladys: That’s also an alias.

JT as Bill: Nah.

KS as Gladys: Thanks to him, the entire deus ex machina is in dire jeopardy.

JT as Bill: I figured something was up.

KS as Gladys: Later tonight, Sir Herod will draw Miss Salome aside. She will finger her tassels, he will clear his throat, she will tap her toe.

JT as Bill: Yeah?

KS as Gladys: Absolute darkness.

JT as Bill: So?

KS as Gladys: You try constructing a seduction without moonlight.

JT as Bill: Touching and stuff?

KS as Gladys: Complete with X-rated choreography.

JT as Bill: This Miss Salome?

KS as Gladys: Is being led down the garden path, minus the atmospheric lighting.

JT as Bill: Somebody should warn her.

KS as Gladys: Oh, pity this play doesn’t have a hero.

JT as Bill: I volunteer.

KS as Gladys: You?

JT as Bill: Why not?

KS as Gladys: You’re only a secondary story line.

JT as Bill: I’ll pad my part.

VB: So why does Gladys do this?

MF: I think she wants to piss off Salome, ’cause she does not like her, you know…

VB: ‘Cause again, we drift into that question of what character or what person is in what play at what moment. This leads to something not great happening to Bill. Gladys cleans her costume every night. She knows what takes place. She knows there’s a headman’s axe. Is she just making sure that the show goes on?

MF: Yeah, that’s a really good point.

VB: This is what’s, in some way, so much fun about what Doric’s done here with… Jordan, you referred to this being a play within a play within a play, but like where is the play, like the original play that they came here to do? What is that play?

MF: Yes.

VB: Because I don’t think we ever hear a single line of that play.

MF: No.

VB: It’s like multiple plays happening simultaneously, and we don’t know who is in which play at which moment and who is impacting who in which level of character.

KS as Gladys: They’ll throw you in the summerhouse.

JT as Bill: But we didn’t put up the summerhouse.

KS as Gladys: The summerhouse is there at the end of the garden where it’s always been.

JT as Bill: But how did it…

KS as Gladys: Always remember, Gladys is your friend.

JT as Bill: If you say so.

KS as Gladys: Always remember, Lane is not your friend.

JT as Bill: But…

KS as Gladys: What I just confided in you…

JT as Bill: About the damsel in distress?

KS as Gladys: Mull it over, Galahad.

VB: “Always remember Lane is not your friend.”

MF: Yes, and “always remember Gladys is your friend.” Are either of those statements true?

VB: Well, and it’s funny because we do get to these points about who is true, who loves who, who is telling the truth when they say that they are somebody’s friend or that they care about somebody…

MF: Right.

VB: Which we have our next example of coming up in this Bill/Salome scene.

[ music ]

JS: Which we will get to, but first, let’s take a moment to understand what a third-tier biblical character has to do with contemporary queer culture.

VB: Salome, interestingly, starts out, her first appearance is unnamed in a bible story. The story touches on a very important figure who predates Salome, and that is John the Baptist. John the Baptist was a contemporary of Jesus Christ, born probably before, is supposedly related, but was basically given the assignment from the womb of heralding the coming of the Messiah. Some of his followers actually thought that he was the Messiah. He would encourage them to actually follow Jesus instead as the actual Messiah. John the Baptist also went around saying some things that pissed people off that were in power. In particular, he had criticized Herod for marrying somebody that he shouldn’t have, and he was imprisoned supposedly for that action, and that’s what put him into the orbit of Salome, and that’s what led to some of these stories that we’re gonna be talking about today.

JS: The name Salome, though, we actually first get from the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, who writes about the very people that you’ve been talking about in the biblical story in Mark and Matthew.

David Leeper: But an opportunity came when Herod, on his birthday, gave a banquet for his courtiers and officers and for the leaders of Galilee. When his daughter Herodias came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his guests. And the king said to the girl, “Ask me for whatever you wish and I will give it.” And he solemnly swore to her, “Whatever you ask me, I will give you, even half of my kingdom.” She went out to her mother, “What should I ask for?” She replied, “The head of John the Baptizer.” Immediately, she rushed back to the king and requested, “I want you to give me the head of John the Baptizer on a platter.” The king was deeply grieved, yet out of regard for his hosts and for the guests, he did not want to refuse her. Mark 6:21-26.

JS: What I find so fascinating about this, as you mentioned, Virginia, it’s John’s accusation of the ruling class for engaging in sexual impropriety, that Herodias and Herod are… It’s almost like Hamlet, right? The father is dead, and so the brother comes in and remarries the wife. And this is, supposedly, what John the Baptist is railing against as sexual immorality. So I think that’s actually an interesting factor to keep in mind as we think about how Doric Wilson as a sort of gay rights activist understands power and sexual liberation, and the hypocrisy that comes around sexuality by the time he writes his play in the 1960s.

MF: Especially, I was thinking about this the other day, the kind of contrast between the decadence of Herod’s court, as we see it portrayed not necessarily in the Bible, but in later versions, and Doric Wilson’s “court”, which is essentially the characters of Importance of Being Earnest, which is anything but decadent. Super tightly laced. You know what I mean?

VB: What’s interesting for me, anyway, in talking about this is this great difference between that very sort of straightforward telling of the story of a mother getting revenge on a man for criticizing her and what became the view later around sort of the turn of the… Into the 19th century of this view of Salome as this lustful virgin whore, where she is actually taking more agency, and it’s because of this sort of irrepressible thing that is just inherent in women.

JS: I think that’s so true. And hearing you talk about it that way, it makes me think, “Oh, right, we’re kind of going back to Eve in some way.” Right? The sort of woman as temptress that brings about downfall, who causes man to commit sin. I think you’re right, it’s really functioning within that paradigm.

VB: One piece that I found on the obsession with the figure of Salome as a blood-thirsty virgin, “In the turn of the century imagination the figure of Salome epitomized the inherent perversity of women, their eternal circularity, and their ability to destroy the male soul even while they remain nominally chaste in body.”

MF: Who wrote that?

VB: Dijkstra.

MF: Wow. [laughter] Ouch.

VB: Yeah, it’s truly fascinating. And I find all of this really intriguing, especially when thinking about the character of Salome. This version of Salome as a woman with agency, but when you give a woman agency, what does she want? She immediately wants… Lustfully, she wants chaste men to be decapitated. That vision of the story is what Wilde picked up to use for his exploration of Salome, his experiment with writing in French.

JS: And I would say it’s both the French language and also the French style, that he’s writing in this mood of almost like symbolist poetry, that is intersecting with… I don’t know, I almost wanna call it like a Gothic imagination, ’cause there’s something so bloody about the story. And at the same time, even though the play is labeled a tragedy, it’s witty. There’s a kind of brand of social satire that you expect from Wilde that is in this play as well. And so the combination of these things, I think is fascinating.

VB: Yeah, Wilde said about this, “I have one instrument that I know I can command, and that is the English language. There was another instrument to which I had listened all my life, and I wanted once to touch this new instrument and to see whether I could make any beautiful thing out of it.”

MF: Wow.

VB: So taking both the French language and all of the kind of artistic experimentation that was going on with that language, plus his own spirit, and out of that came Salome.

JS: He’s also writing so much about the philosophy aestheticism, and so the whole notion of art being in the service of beauty, as you say, there seems to be an overdrive in this play. Unlike the more comedy of manners plays that many of us are used to seeing from Wilde, here he really is focused on the idea of beauty; the beauty of the moon, the beauty of Salome, the beauty of one’s passion. Even Salome starts describing different body parts of Iokannan as beautiful. And this kind of desire for beauty both as a life force and also as a destructive force is just swirling around this play.

VB: And each thing that she describes that she then cannot have, she then immediately describes in the opposite, sort of the horror and revulsion of the beauty that she cannot touch.

JS: Absolutely.

VB: And this is something that we will definitely stick a pin in, because as far as beauty and how that then impacts Oscar Wilde as we move forward into talking about how the trials of Oscar Wilde feed into what Doric Wilson does with this, this is really very important.

JS: You saying this just made me realize this though, that Herod actually follows a similar pattern, in that he is desiring Salome, but the very last line of the play, which is one of perhaps the most shocking I can think of in dramatic literature, is Salome has won, she’s done the dance, she’s gotten her prize, she is kissing the severed head of John the Baptist. And the very last line of the play that Herod says is, “Kill that woman.” And so this destruction of the femme fatale, right? The beautiful object that cannot be had can only end in her own destruction.

VB: And it’s another Wildean invention.

MF: Yeah.

VB: Salome, according to the original story, and also many future versions, lives.

JS: Well, I think this raises an interesting question about whether Wilde does see Salome as evil, and I’m not sure entirely that he does.

MF: I wonder if that’s a little bit of a reflection of what’s going on at the time, that you can’t really leave a loose end like that. You can’t really let evil go unpunished. I mean, if we’re talking around “well-made play” time etcetera, even if that’s gonna bleed into symbolism poetry that kind of stuff is… It wouldn’t be too shocking to let her get away with it.

MF: No, I don’t think he does. You know how playwrights always put themselves in their own plays, I wonder if in a way Salome is not Wilde.

VB: It’s not just cleaning up, although it definitely does clean up a loose end, ’cause sort of that was a big question mark over me for the story of Salome [chuckle] before. In fact, I think I’d read later on that Salome did marry twice supposedly and had kids and whatever, I’m trying to think, mmmm, no?

MF: No, I like it better this way. It’s a lot more mysterious.

JS: Well, and it also fits the tragic mold.

MF: Right.

JS: That actually Salome’s death is the third death in Wilde’s version. First there is the suicide of the Young Syrian, then the beheading of John the Baptist, and then Herod’s ordering for Salome herself to be killed. So there’s a bit of a body count by the end of this as there should be in any good tragedy.

VB: So just chronologically, Oscar Wilde’s Salome, did the film version come out next?

JS: Well, so just in terms of like the stage version, which we haven’t spoken about yet, he finishes writing the play in 1891 and supposedly it’s in rehearsal in 1892 with Sarah Bernhardt, the great French tragedienne. And then the Lord Chamberlain who was in charge of censoring the public theater in Britain closed it down, said that you are not allowed to perform plays that have biblical characters. And so it put the kabash on the play. So if this is in 1892, the play then is published in French in 1893 and in English in 1894, and that’s when we get those famous drawings, those illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley that inform the imagination of that 1923 film version, which very much used those illustrations as a sort of inspiration, for the look of it. But then history tells us that the first actual performance of the play was in 1896 in Paris.

JS: But here’s the thing, in 1896, Oscar Wilde was not able to attend that performance, and the reason why is because he was in prison. That the trials of Oscar Wilde took place in 1895. And he is found guilty of gross indecency, sentenced to two years hard labor and therefore, he is in prison when the first performance of his play actually takes place.

VB: Wow, that timeline is incredible.

JS: The man’s life had completely altered within just a few years from when he wrote it to when it was actually performed, and that in and of itself is a tragedy and that is also at the heart of the story that Doric Wilson I think then brings to his vision of what this play might really be about.

VB: To jump back to Aubrey Beardsley, if you look at a printed version of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, there are these fascinating illustrations, these sort of beautiful, just black and white line drawings by Aubrey Beardsley. What I understand just from my little bit of reading, Oscar Wilde dedicated an edition of Salome to Beardsley with the statement, “For the only artist who besides myself knows what the dance of the seven veils is and can see that invisible dance.” This was actually before Beardsley had done the illustrations, and I understand just from a little thing that I read on the side and I’ve not dug into it, that Oscar Wilde did not actually love those illustrations. So it turned out that they maybe didn’t completely get the dance of the seven veils.

MF: The text and those illustrations are bound together eternally in my head, so that’s a shocker.

JS: It’s so interesting to think about two different artists having such a different vision of this dance that took place 2000 years ago. What it actually was, what it signifies, how we might re-imagine it now. And perhaps, this is why this story is still so powerful and there are so many versions of this story because it does seem to spark something in the imagination of the artist, but in each artist, differently. And that’s why I’m finding this episode so fascinating to engage with ’cause there were so many different versions of this story told in so many different ways. And so, it makes sense to me that Wilde had his way, Beardsley had his way, if you believe that Lord Alfred Douglas was part of the translation from French into English, that he had his way. [chuckle] There’s just nothing but versions and so Doric Wilson’s version is one among many. Yet another artist envisioning it in their own way.

VB: When you think of the dance of the seven veils or just the dance in general, in the source, the original source material, the order of events is, Salome dances for the birthday, she’s promised anything that she wants, she goes to her mom, gets the order to get the head, gets the head. In Oscar Wilde’s version, she gets the promise to get anything that she wants if she dances, she’s asked to dance, she refuses to dance, she refuses to dance, and then she’s offered anything she wants. She gets the oath that she can have whatever she wants, she dances, and then she asks for the head.

JS: And her mother actually tried to stop her from dancing in Wilde’s version.

VB: In the other source version, is it Flaubert? [chuckle] The short story Herodias, she actually trains Salome for months prior to this birthday so that she can dance for the birthday. So in that, the mother has even more agency, but in this case, Herodias is pretty much just incidental. She’s the whore of Babylon, but she tells her not to dance, she tells her not to dance but then she dances. And then once she asks what she wants, then Herodias is very happy. In Doric Wilson’s version, she actually doesn’t have to dance at all, she exits dancing.

MF: Yeah. The order switches.

VB: Right. So she not only doesn’t have to dance, she gets the promise without really having to do much at all besides just be.

MF: Amazing.

VB: So what is the dance? Is it the sultry, seductive dance that we have seen in so much of the visual versions? Is it that sort of frenetic frantic inspired lunatic dance of that? Or is it some other kind of a dance that pleases the tetrarch so that he gives this girl whatever she wants?

JS: One thing that I think runs in all those different variations is that the dance becomes the center of eroticism within the story. That Salome cannot actually connect with Iokanaan, Herod does not connect with Salome, there’s not actually that kind of sexual engagement happening. Instead of that, in place of that, you get the dance. That’s where the physicality and the eroticism is actually located, and I think why it’s been so compelling on the stage because it theatricalizes those feelings, those desires through the dance. Thinking about agency, I wonder if that is a segue to talk about the Alla Nazimova version in 1923.

MF: We’ll talk about Nazimova and other versions of Salome in a future episode. But I’m concerned we’ve left our Salome waiting long enough. This is the longest scene in the play and there’s a lot to mind here so let’s jump right in.

JT as Bill: Knowing how much Gladys wanted the moon, Bill goes offstage to get it for her.

VB as The Actress: The Actress appears in full Salome costume.

KS as Gladys: Gladys beats a hasty exit.

JT as Bill: And Bill emerges, quickly hiding the moon behind his back.

VB as The Actress: I usually enter side-saddle, riding a giant purple peacock.

MF: Essentially, it’s The Actress warming up, becoming the character. When actors come out on stage, do their vocal exercises or stretch, play the space when there’s nobody else around, that’s what she’s doing here, except she’s essentially putting on her character. There just happens to be a person there.

VB as The Actress: A degenerate molested Mamma today. Uncle Herod’s gone out to catch him.

JT as Bill: You’re not supposed to know about that.

VB as The Actress: I do know about it.

JT as Bill: Figured you must.

VB as The Actress: I know everything.

JT as Bill: Then don’t be scared.

VB as The Actress: I never am.

JT as Bill: You’re safe.

VB as The Actress: Am I?

JT as Bill: I’ll protect you.

VB as The Actress: You will?

JT as Bill: I work here.

VB as The Actress: So you said.

JT as Bill: I’m responsible for…

VB as The Actress: Hanging the lanterns?

JT as Bill: Among my many other duties.

VB as The Actress: Unskilled labor fascinates me.

JT as Bill: It does?

VB as The Actress: From afar.

JT as Bill: Hanging lanterns is a lot more difficult than it looks.

VB as The Actress: It must be.

JT as Bill: It takes…

VB as The Actress: Manual dexterity?

JT as Bill: No, you just have to be good with your hands.

VB as The Actress: I admire expertise.

JS: Tell us about that scene, Virginia.

VB: The thing that I love is watching as Salome is figuring out Bill, while Bill is trying to, in some way, seduce Salome. She says, “I know everything, I’m never scared,” but that’s still a piece of her original character, bossing people around, solid, ready. But we’re still in the world where this person is still a stagehand, isn’t quite in the world of the play yet.

MF: My favorite exchange is coming up.

JT as Bill: You won’t believe this, but my mom has a ceramic lamp by her bed that’s the spitting image of you. When I was a kid, before mom met up with my stepdad, I’d crawl in under the cover with her, and if I was a good boy…

VB as The Actress: She’d let you touch it?

JT as Bill: Yeah.

MF: Bored. Bored. That’s what I love. It’s not seduction at all, it’s “bored.” I love that. One, ’cause it’s so random, two, it’s so creepy, and three, it like Bill back story in a line.

JS: I feel like Salome, not to rely on any misogynistic stereotypes, but sometimes is like a cat. Goes after its prey, but then just looks away as if it doesn’t matter at all, not interested, and then goes in for the attack again. And this kind of back and forth like, “Oh, you interest me, but only from a distance.” To me, this is part of the erotics of what eventually does become a kind of seduction, even though, you’re right, it runs in so many different ways and has so many other goals that she clearly is accomplishing. And in this, in terms of the references to Importance of Being Earnest, I think she is like Gwendolen. Gwendolen is one of those ingenues that is never as innocent or as benign as she might seem. She’s actually an extremely smart character who knows how to get what she wants and ultimately succeeds in doing so. And to me, this is the kind of character that Miss Salome is. An ingenue with teeth. I’m picturing a young Eartha Kitt.

VB: Oooh, yeah.

VB as The Actress: When do we eat?

JT as Bill: Well, after church.

VB as The Actress: Church?

JT as Bill: Devotions.

VB as The Actress: I’m hungry.

JT as Bill: I’ll find Lane.

VB as The Actress: You’ll do nothing of the sort.

JT as Bill: But Miss Salome…

VB as The Actress: I am a nameless woman.

JS: So at this point, again, Salome is just playing with Bill, and she suddenly has this sort of fantasy. And after setting up this whole thing about her mother being harassed by the villainous gay character, she says to Bill…

VB as The Actress: I wish you were the degenerate.

JT as Bill: You do?

JS: And then Salome, pointing her finger, gun-like at Bill…

VB as The Actress: I’d take a gun and shoot your head off.

JS: So this is interesting to me for two reasons: First of all, the character who’s been presented to us as the representative of heterosexual masculinity is being re-cast as the degenerate in Salome’s fantasy. And what she then proposes to do to him is what Salome actually does to John the Baptist in the original story, which is to say, have his head removed. In this case, she says, “I wanna shoot your head off.” So again, Doric is playing with the language, that particular idiom, to give us that echo, that callback to the original text.

VB: I was gonna say, the callback, but also the foreshadowing ’cause we’re headed in that direction as well.

JS: Absolutely.

JT as Bill: You got a gun?

VB as The Actress: I’m a girl. Girls don’t play with guns.

JT as Bill: So again, we go right back to stereotypes or archetypes.

VB as The Actress: Yeah. Of course, Miss Salome doesn’t need a gun.

JT as Bill: Then you couldn’t shoot my head off.

VB as The Actress: Then I’d be at your mercy.

JT as Bill: Just like on TV.

JS: Just wanna point this out though too, that at this point in the play, we are seeing Miss Salome in full Victorian dress, while Bill is like in a t-shirt and baseball cap, right? He’s still dressed like a contemporary American, and so just visually, what we’re seeing between these two characters crossing over between class and gender and time period and everything else, it’s just so theatricalized in that sort of image, that stage picture.

VB: Yes, this would definitely be one of the images that you would grab in the photo shoot for the publicity photos. Yes. So Bill had hidden behind his back…

VB as The Actress: It’s all rusted red.

JT as Bill: I can clean it off.

VB as The Actress: Yuck!

JT as Bill: Maybe a Brillo pad.

VB as The Actress: I don’t think I like it.

JT as Bill: It’s supposed to be the moon.

VB as The Actress: Away from me with that. Get rid of it. Now, dispose of it before it can cause even more damage.

JT as Bill: But it’s only an old tray.

The Actress: Tray? You fool, you idiot, you, you lunatic! Will dinner be served from that?

JT as Bill: Oh no. Uh, no.

VB as The Actress: Then throw the tray away.

VB as Salome: I, Salome, order it.

JT as Bill: You?

VB as Salome: I lost my namelessness.

JS: Why do you think she recoils in horror?

MF: Yeah.

JS: It’s so strong. What’s going on?

VB: Here’s where I think the recoiling in horror is. There is a part, there is a part of her that does not want to step all the way into Salome. And the knowledge that the moon being the trigger, although it doesn’t in necessarily this, but it is 100% the trigger in Wilde’s Salome, knowing that the moon leads to the ultimate end, there’s like that tiny bit that’s still fighting it. And the second that she basically orders the tray to be thrown away as Salome, she has to go fully into Salome to get Bill to do that, and that just ends up being the trigger for the rest of it anyway. The moon isn’t what causes it.

JS: I love this interpretation, and in some ways it makes me think of like one of those other great meta-plays like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which the characters have some vague notion while this is happening in real time, of the fact that they are trapped in a play. They’re trapped in a tragedy, it’s been pre-written. They know how it’s gonna end. Is there a part of Salome that knows, ’cause she does this every night, right, as an actress, that that moon spells doom for the characters in the play? Is that part of what’s happening here, but with that kind of Tom Stoppard, like comic inversion of it?

MF: Right. Which from an audience point of view, if you’re watching a character freak out about that so drastically, and if not drop their mask, pick up another one, again, it just puts you even more off balance and just gives you this feeling of dread without knowing what that is.

VB: Yeah, everything else goes off balance, but Salome becomes focused. Like completely targeted, focused, I am Salome, everything that I’m doing from this point on is towards the ultimate end that we’re all expecting to come of this play.

JS: Well, and I think that’s an important thing for the audience that they know either their Bible or their Oscar Wilde, that we do know the end. And so it’s part of the fun, but also possibly the dramatic tension is like, will they meet the same end? Can it be diverted? Can something else happen? How will this actually play out? That sort of like a dramatic irony, if you know what the ending is, but the characters may not, you watch it differently.

VB: ‘Cause this is funny, there are still jokes.

MF: And also, we’re certainly not following any direct path to anything, so really, anything could happen and will. So yeah, why wouldn’t it?

VB: Right after that, Salome says…

VB as Salome: I like you.

JT as Bill: You do?

VB as Salome: Are all Americans handsome?

JT as Bill: Most.

VB as Salome: Which tribe are you?

JT as Bill: Tribe? [chuckle] Oh, tribe? No, see…

VB as Salome: When did you say dinner would be?

JT as Bill: I didn’t.

VB as Salome: Are all Americans retarded?

JT as Bill: I…

VB as Salome: You’re not. You’re wonderful.

JT as Bill: I…

VB as Salome: And do you like me, don’t you?

JT as Bill: I’m not so sure.

VB as Salome: Are you trifling with me? Am I some toy for you to play with and then dispose off, like you did with the, like Uncle Herod did with poor Mama.

JT as Bill: I guess I like you.

VB as Salome: You guess?

JT as Bill: You shouldn’t be here.

MF: Bill then tries to warn Salome about the seduction plot, he even suggests they run away to America together, which prompts a reversal.

VB as Salome: I intend to report you.

JT as Bill: Report me?

VB as Salome: To Uncle Herod for speaking to me.

JT as Bill: You talked to me first.

VB as Salome: Prove it.

JT as Bill: You like me.

VB as Salome: Fat chance.

JT as Bill: But you said.

VB as Salome: I also intend to report your larceny.

JT as Bill: Larceny?

VB as Salome: You attempted to pawn off on me a glass of burgled milk.

JT as Bill: You’re nuts.

VB as Salome: I also intend to report your vandalism. You deliberately destroyed property belonging to the house of Herod.

JT as Bill: I did not.

VB as Salome: Willfully, did you discard of a precious Mesopotamian tray – middle period – one of a matched pair.

JT as Bill: You ordered it.

VB as Salome: Unlikely.

JT as Bill: It wasn’t precious.

VB as Salome: Irreplaceable.

JT as Bill: It was all rusted red.

VB as Salome: Terracotta.

JT as Bill: I’ll go find it.

VB as Salome: You have not been dismissed.

JT as Bill: You didn’t mean what you said.

VB as Salome: What did I say?

JT as Bill: About…

VB as Salome: Liking you?

JT as Bill: Yeah.

VB as Salome: Dare you say I didn’t mean it. I like you. I like all footmen. And I am grateful you warned me. Although you were mistaken. Never was the victim meant to be me.

MF: The lights fade as Miss Salome exits through the French doors. End of Act One. It’s a great exit line. I expect Gladys to pop on stage and go…

[ music ]

JS: Intermission.

MF: Yes.

MF: And the end of Act One brings us to the end of this episode of Out Lines.

JS: How long is intermission?

VB: I don’t know that yet, but I do know this. There’s never enough time to do what you need to do.

MF: What do we need to do?

VB: Well, I don’t know about you, but I want to use intermission to get to know more about the playwright himself.

JS: I love this idea.

MF: Me too. Join us for our intermission episode of Out Lines, which we dedicate completely to the legendary playwright and co-founder of The Other Side of Silence, Doric Wilson.

[ music ]

Doric Wilson: We never realized what we were doing was brave.

JS: He charmed my mother.

MF: Where’s my fan?

VB: There’s that laugh that you get. That moment where it’s like “That’s Doric yelling into his own play.”

JS: He’s always got a political perspective.

CW: Thank you for listening to Out Lines! Subscribe, get lost in our show notes, and check out some awfully cute kitty pics at outlinespod.com. Season One of Out Lines features conversations and readings recorded between September 2020 and April 2021. This episode’s selections from Doric Wilson’s Now, She Dances! were directed by Mark Finley, and feature Virginia Baeta, Christopher Borg, Gail Dennison, Karen Stanion, Jay Thomas, and me Who feels remarkably honored to be included in this group since I don’t currently cohabitate with a cat. Although Mark you should watch out. Simon’s been texting me. #FreeSimon. Thanks to Sarah Wardrop for the production magic, to the dastardly Morry Campbell for the theme music, and to Free To Use Sounds. You are all stars!

VB: Out Lines is a production of The Weakest Thing.