About a year ago, Imago Theatre’s Jerry Mouawad asked me, “What’s the fewest number of actors you’d need to mount Oscar Wilde’s Salome?” I told him, “Seven.” He replied, “See if you can do it in eight.”

And so my first-ever stage adaptation of a classic began, a semi-private process that started as if I were a ghost writer who’d signed a nondisclosure agreement. I didn’t tell anyone about the assignment. I wasn’t sure I’d request a credit should an actual show ensue. And to be honest, the “not knowing” provided a strange freedom to test out various ideas that might’ve felt too risky given other circumstances.

My goal was to convert Wilde’s tragic pageant into something more like a Strindbergian chamber piece. To distill. To intensify. To collaborate with the dead, albeit with invisible ink. It proved to be an invigorating experiment and not just a dramaturgical exercise.

Looking back, I’m glad I didn’t hesitate to say, “Yes.” I could’ve easily recoiled at tampering with a masterpiece, no matter how light my intended touch. But one of the beauties of working with Jerry – which I have done repeatedly – is that each production is an adventure into unfamiliar terrain.

He commissioned my first radio play, The Strange Case of Nick M.; gave me a crash course in Pirandello via Voiceover; and co-wrote our existential puppet play, My Bedroom Is an Installation.

So why not go all essentialist with a verse drama that happened to be a major scandal in its day? I wasn’t the first to tamper with the script, after all. Even the original – as we’ve come to know it – is a bit of a mashup, since Wilde first wrote Salome in French, then had his on-again, off-again lover translate it into English before Wilde patched it up in English again.

Furthermore, although it’s been on Broadway five times (twice with Al Pacino, and once with an all-Black cast), the play is probably best known as the libretto of Richard Strauss’s famous opera, itself a German translation that took a few liberties (then also got banned).

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So what would I do? And how could I pare down the cast size without losing Wilde? I knew I wanted to foreground the Page of Herodias and the Young Syrian Soldier; their homoerotic B story offers a parallel tale of forbidden love that foreshadows that of Salome and John the Baptist. But unlike Strauss’s translator-librettist Hedwig Lachmann, I decided not to discard the Roman emissary Tigellinus. Instead, I made him a woman, a female advisor, and thereby turned Herod’s court into one dominated by powerful women: his wife, his stepdaughter, and this new confidante. I felt that such a shift would amplify the gender war inherent in Salome while also providing another actress with a meaty role.

The main characters would stay the same, of course: old lecherous Herod, his scheming wife Herodias, prudish prophet Jokanaan, and the titular nymphette who’s infinitely harder to define. And while I’d expanded the Page – making him infinitely more gossipy and omnipresent – the real challenge remained: What to do with all the bit parts?! Could I actually reduce Salome’s sizable dramatis personae to a mere two players?

In the original text, aside from the characters mentioned above, there’s also a Cappadocian, a Nubian, two Nazarenes, a Sadducee, a Pharisee, multiple soldiers, multiple slaves, five Jewish men, an executioner, and “all the court” who materialize courtesy of a single stage direction when Herod first takes the stage.

None of them felt ready to step into the spotlight. I tried double- and triple-casting, too, but that didn’t work, because I didn’t want the audience marveling about who was playing whom at any given moment. So distracting. Personally, I like each actor to feel as though their role is a substantial one. Luckily, economy is the mother of invention.

For reasons I no longer remember, I initially called one of my new characters the Cappadocian and the other, the Tiberian. Yet it became clear, as Jerry entered rehearsals, that assigning nationalities came with unwanted baggage. I wasn’t looking for regional traits. And I recognized these new roles represented the chorus (which I needed the audience to know from the get-go). That’s when I came up with the idea of The Traveling Merchant and The Palace Servant.

The Traveling Merchant allowed me to introduce someone who would question their surroundings, a curious outsider with an active interest in learning the lay of the land by actively investigating what was unfolding around them. There’s something natural about an out-of-towner hanging back from the action and commenting on it; or periodically joining the dialogue only to drop out moments later.

As for the Palace Servant, he’s a member of the community. He gives us a chance to hear from the hoi polloi, from the common people. Unlike the Traveling Merchant, who, like the audience, is seeing this world anew, the Palace Servant is more invested in the action as a member of the servant class. And since the play takes place on the night of a big party (where drinking features heavily offstage), alcohol would permit this person to speak transgressively from time to time.

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Speaking of what’s said, I did rework some of the dialogue to accommodate these changes. But more often this was accomplished by simply reassigning lines that Wilde had rewritten himself. On those rare occasions when Jerry or an actor would propose an additional textual change, I always balanced their concerns with the rhythm and the meaning of Wilde’s language.

Not a simple task. I specifically recall making a persuasive case for keeping the word “didst” and not modernizing to “did” because the affectation strikes me as an indicator of Wilde’s imagined performance style: Grand! His success de scandale is rooted in 19th century melodrama, more than 20th-century kitchen sink drama.

And with that in mind, it is my hope that this adaptation owes less to neon, and more to the chandelier. More than a hundred years after its debut, the wildly witty Salome should convey a luminous glow, not a glare.