By Elizabeth Clark-Stern

 

 

   

      

 


Directed by the author, with copious contributions from the ensemble.
Sound operation by Donna Lee. Sound recording by Brent Robinett.
Lighting by John Stern. Assistant to the Director Dylan Hansen.
Box Office: Diane Bogue, Bunny Brown, Jane Johnston, Barb Morgan.
Music by Dimitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, and Ludwig Beethoven

Cast In Order Of Appearance

Sigmund Freud. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  Robert Bergman
Lou Andreas Salome. . . . . . . . . . . . .Lindsay Rosen
Salome, of the first century. . . . . . . . Karlie Markendorf
Sophia, Divine Wisdom. . . . . . . . . . .Elizabeth Clark-Stern
Frederick Nietzsche. . . . . . . . . . . . . .Tim Nelson
Elizabeth Nietzsche . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Ann Blake
Rainer Maria Rilke. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kevin Filocamo
Leo Tolstoy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Robert Bergman
   (Freud and Tolstoy are both portrayed by Robert Bergman)


Time:

Flows from 1910 to the non-temporal Underworld to the 1880s to 1926

Settings:

Freud's consulting room in Vienna, Austria (multiple scenes take place here)
A valley across from Sisyphus's hill in the Underworld
Nietzsche's apartment in Rome (two scenes take place here)
Lou's unconscious mind (multiple scenes take place here)
Street outside Lou's home in Munich
Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's estate in Russia
Street outside a theater in Munich
Rilke's home in Munich

Playwright's Note:

Song of Salome takes place in two dimensions of reality: the temporal material everyday world, and the world of dreams, fantasies and visions that live in the unconscious mind. In the outer world, Lou was unconventional, brainy, the youngest and only girl in a family of six brothers. She was close to her father, a German diplomat who worked in St. Petersburg. Hence, though German, Lou was born and grew up in Czarist Russia in the late 1880s. Her confidence and intellectual curiosity led her to write many books, from Henrik Ibsen's Female Characters, to novels, to critical essays on the nature of Christianity and on the ideas of Fredrick Nietzsche. She crafted formidable relationships with Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, Sigmund Freud, and others.

As for Lou's inner life, I, as playwright, made the leap of inhabiting her inner landscape with feminine Archetypes symbolizing the Divine Feminine (Sophia) and the Dark Feminine (First Century Salome, who danced the burlesque Seven Veils to win the head of John the Baptist.

My inspiration emerged from Bev Osband's workshop on Jung's Answer to Job. Jung's construct of Job in dialogue with God and the Devil, while engaging, seemed to leave out the energy of the Feminine. Lindsey Rosen mentioned Lou Salome, and out of this I envisioned combining a biographical play that included a Feminine aspect of Darkness and Light. We ask the audience to journey with us through the serpentine structure of the play -- scenes of Lou's outer life followed by scenes inside her mind. I don't know the precise form of the real Lou Salome's inner characters, but we all have our demons and our better angels. May Lou's inner Sophia and her inner first contury Salome serve as symbols for the ancient conflict that lives within us all . . . and does Salome of the Seven Veils have her own story to live out across the centuries? What does this say about the Archetypes we "house," and the greater identity, the greater consciousness we are nestled within?
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