Anatomy, war and scandal
“The Cult of the Clitoris.” That was the headline on a 1918 piece in the Vigilante, a political journal published by Noel Pemberton Billing, the rabid right-wing British member of Parliament, accusing the San Francisco-bred exotic dancer Maud Allan of being a lesbian, a sadist and a German sympathizer. To prove his point, Billing — who’d riled wartime England with his outrageous claim that the Germans were blackmailing “47,000 highly placed British perverts” — trumpeted the fact that Allan, who’d made her name in Europe in the early 1900s performing her version of Salome’s “Dance of the Seven Veils,” was appearing in private performances of Oscar Wilde’s infamous play “Salomé,” which the British government had banned from public performance.
Allan sued Billing for libel. The sensational trial that followed — a frontpage diversion from the horrific slaughter taking place in the fields and trenches of World War I France and Belgium — inspired “Salomania,” a new play by the noted Bay Area writer-director Mark Jackson that premieres at Aurora Theatre on Friday night.
“Billing’s contention was that only doctors or perverts would know what a clitoris was,” says Jackson, who became fascinated by the trial, whose transcripts he acquired from a London antiquarian bookstore, while researching the “Salomé” he directed at Aurora in 2006. “The lack of male understanding of the female anatomy provides a great deal of humor for the play,” whose themes of media sensationalism, gay bashing and wartime hysteria are “entirely about our present moment.”
Jackson’s play juxtaposes the war and life on the home front (six actors double as soldiers and civilian characters), exploring the surreal world in which a British officer breakfasts in the deadly trenches and lunches hours later in his tony London club.
Allan, who lost the libel suit and her career — 20 years earlier, she’d changed her name from Durrant after her brother, Theodore, was convicted of murdering two Mission District girls and hanged at San Quentin — “was both a potential hero and a potential threat to society,” Jackson says. “She was intentionally pushing boundaries.”
Get more information at www.auroratheatre.org.