No decent person, unless a medical professional, should know what a clitoris is. If you do know what it is, clearly you are depraved.
That was part of the testimony that Noel Pemberton Billing, a member of the British Parliament, offered in his defense in a libel suit brought against him by exotic dancer Maud Allan. And Maud Allan obviously knew what a clitoris was because it was a Billing-endorsed magazine article titled "The Cult of the Clitoris" that sparked her lawsuit.
Billed as "the trial of the century," it had faded into obscurity long before the century was over. But while Mark Jackson was preparing to director Oscar Wilde's Salome for Aurora Theatre in 2006, he came across references to Allan and her Wilde-inspired dance Vision of Salome that brought her both international fame and notoriety. And like Wilde, she brought down her own career by suing for libel against a prominent public figure who suggested the plaintiff was homosexual.
The more Jackson researched Allan's career and trial, played out during the first World War, the more intrigued he became by not only its often outrageous details but also about its connections to larger societal issues. When Aurora's Artistic Director Tom Ross offered Jackson a commission to write a new play, they quickly agreed on the Maud Allan scandal as its basis. The result, Salomania, begins performances this week at the Berkeley theater.
"The transcripts from the trials are amazing," Jackson said, "starting with the complete lack of understanding by every man in the courtroom of the female anatomy. Not even the judge or Maud's own lawyer recognized the word 'orgasm.'"
But a village doctor had helped define "clitoris" for the gathering. It was an "organ that, when unduly excited ... possessed the most dreadful influence on any woman."
Jackson, who is directing his own play, wasn't interested in creating a straightforward courtroom drama. "I knew it had to be the meat of it, but part of what was interesting to me was the entire society at the time," Jackson said. "World War I was a completely unprecedented war, and took away any vestiges of romance about war."
The connections between life in the trenches that Jackson depicts in overlapping scenes from the trial and suggestions of Allan's diaphanously costumed Salome performances emerged from conspiracy theories promoted by Billing and his colleagues. They claimed that Germany had converted tens of thousands of Britons into susceptible homosexuals who undermined the nation's resolve in prosecuting the war.
"A little black book," Billing averred, held by a German prince in Albania, contained a list of names of the morally compromised that reached to the highest levels in British government. It was the result of German agents "who have infested this country for the past 20 years, agents so vile and spreading such debauchery and such lasciviousness as only German minds can conceive and only German bodies execute."
In Jackson's staging, Madeline H.D. Brown plays Allan, while six other actors do onstage quick changes to play two dozen more characters, ranging from battlefield to courthouse to theater. Even Oscar Wilde, who died in 1900, makes an appearance, as does his onetime lover Alfred Douglas, better known as Bosie, who actually testified against Maud Allan while stating that Wilde was "the greatest force for evil that has appeared in Europe in the past 350 years."
Atop all this intrigue is a local connection that helped further turn the jury against Allan. Raised in San Francisco, she changed her name from Beulah Maude Durrant and moved to Europe after her brother had been found guilty of murdering two women in the Mission District and was executed. This was revealed in a surprise courtroom move that fed into the belief of hereditary depravity.
"Her family and the incident with her brother were extremely painful to her, and became the inspiration for her Salome dance," Jackson said. "That dance was really about the guilt she felt for her brother and not being there for him. In public life, she was very proper, whereas onstage she's wearing almost nothing but pearls. The cult of personality she created around herself was based on this dichotomy of a proud person with a very dark secret."
Jackson, whose previous Bay Area productions include The Death of Meyerhold and American $uicide, will next work on an adaptation of Woyzeck with music by Tom Waits for a fall production with Shotgun Players.
While his subjects are eclectic, Jackson does have a unifying drive behind his choices. "I like work that needs to be done on the stage and can't be done anyplace else," he said. "I want to exploit what only theater can do."
Salomania will run June 15-July 22 at Aurora Theatre. Tickets are $34-$48. Call (510) 843-4822 or go to www.auroratheatre.org.