Voigt, center, performs the Dance of the Seven Veils (photo courtesy WNO)

Tonight, Francesca Zambello's production of Salome premieres at the Kennedy Center Opera House. In today's Post, Ann Midgette wondered twice whether the piece had been defanged — because in this day and age, seeing a woman make out with a decapitated head is commonplace, I guess? — and said this production will have to focus on interior motivations due to Washington National Opera's well-publicized money issues.

Zambello says she wanted to focus on the people telling the story.

Zambello (Photo courtesy WNO)

"I’m really interested in the characters," she says. We are sitting in the Opera House, mostly in the dark, as the lights change color on the giant clear-plastic curtain that separates the terrace where all the opera's action happens from the palace. "What’s important to me is portraying the characters and the way their obsessions destroy themselves."

Those obsessions are pretty icky. (If you want to brush up on the show before you go, it's based on Oscar Wilde's play —Salome isn't named in biblical accounts — which you can purchase as a Kindle edition for 95 cents) Take King Herod, who's married his dead brother's wife Herodias and takes a not-exactly-paternal interest in her daughter, Salome. "He’s a a king but he’s not in possesion of his full powers," Zambello says. in Wilde's play Herod compares his jewels, titles, and feet compulsively to Caesar's and frets that the emperor might visit.

Herod's locked up Jokanaan (John the Baptist) because he's terrified of him. "It’s not dissimilar to locking people up in Guantanamo Bay," Zambello says.

And then there's the relationship between Salome, who fixates on the imprisoned prophet. She has him brought up from the cistern in which he's imprisoned and does her best to convince him to take a roll in the sand. "I will kiss your mouth," she warns. And when her stepfather asks her to dance for him, she figures out a way this might happen.

"The dance in Salome is an eight-minute event," Zambello says. It's a sword to fall on for sopranos. It’s a a lot to ask of an opera singer to dance for eight minutes. They’re supposed to take off all their clothes."

The soprano Deborah Voigt, who plays Salome, does remove her dress before scurrying quickly offstage, a not-insignificant event for a woman who was famously fired for not fitting into a dress for a 2004 production of Ariadne auf Naxos in London and lost an entire person's worth of weight since. (She made a cute video about that when she returned to London to reprise the role.)

"She does a good dance," Zambello says. "She knows full well what she wants."

That would be a way to bestow that kiss on Jokanaan. Herod's promised her anything in exchange for the dance, and when she asks for the prophet's head (the noggin in question was covered in extreme detail by TBD yesterday), he begs her to reconsider. Herodias, disgusted by Salome's behavior before this, eggs her on, another dynamic that appeals to Zambello. In relationships with women and their mothers, she says, "Either you're in agreement or it's total war."

Set designer Peter J. Davison has put together a stage that purposefully stays out of the story's way. And if it saves a little money, hey. "I selected what I thought would work artistically as well as economically," he says. The blue arch in the back? Reused from a retired WNO production of Clemenza di Tito. Davison nabbed it from the company's prop warehouse in Baltimore.

The clear plastic curtain, though, does not reflect thriftiness. "It’s just a kind of misty effect, he says, a way to delineate the "two worlds" of the story. "The castle and the terrace."

Also, he says, "You could equate it to the plastic sheets in an abbatoir."

Says Zambello: "You will not be bored."