Leni
Strawberry Theatre Workshop
at the Erickson Theater
Through Aug 9.
History cannot make up its mind about Leni Riefenstahl. The
inscrutable Nazi-era filmmaker who made Triumph of the Will has
been lauded as a genius and vilified as a monster, usually in the same
breath. But according to Leni, the electric new play about the
director and her polarized legacy, Riefenstahl was, more than anything,
a tough lady living in tough times. “I am hated not only for my art,
but for loving my art,” she proclaims during a reenactment of her
postwar interrogation at Nuremberg. “I am on trial for bad timing,
talent, and pride.”
Sarah Greenman wrote Leni as a conversation between the
clever, naive Leni the Younger (Alexandra Tavares) and the steely, wry
Leni the Elder (Amy Thone). They discuss, argue about, and reenact
scenes from their life for hidden cameras, which project onto screens
leaning on the stage. Together, Thone (who won a Stranger Genius Award
in 2007) and Tavares are a Janus-faced marvel—their acting crisp
and muscular, their relationship charged and wary.
Leni the Younger isn’t a Nazi, but a coquettish filmmaker who
happens to work for the Nazis. So what if she has to bat her eyes to
coax another million marks out of Hitler? That, she says, is the price
of being a woman artist. Leni the Elder is a stern but disappointed
creature (the defeat of the Nazis ended her career) with a veneer of
cold humor. She looks at her younger self with bitter longing, knowing
that Leni the Younger will define the aesthetic of modern film—as
well as be arrested, pilloried, and detained for four years of
“de-Nazification.” More than 100 filmmakers worked for the Reich, Leni
the Elder declares, “and I was the only woman.” For that reason, she
says with swelling rage, the Allies targeted her: “No one cornered
Albert Speer in a dark room, and asked, ‘So did you fuck the
Führer?'”
Hell hath no fury like a genius scorned—Leni evokes the
fury brilliantly, but doesn’t parse the scorn. Leni is
Leni’s. BRENDAN KILEY
Sitting in Circles with Rich White Girls: Memoirs of a Bulimic
Black Boy
Brownbox Theater
at Rainier Valley Cultural Center
Through July 20.
Chad Goller-Sojourner is a poet and self-described “spoken word
performance artist.” Many of his poems have been incorporated into this
hour-long solo show. There’s certainly been enough drama in
Goller-Sojourner’s life to warrant autobiographical treatment: He’s an
African-American gay man born in 1970 in Tacoma, adopted by white
parents, and raised in mostly white schools. Things get even more
complicated when he develops bulimia, and school officials send him to
a support group full of white girls to talk about it.
The stories are fascinating, and it’s still refreshing to hear a man
speak candidly about his body-image problems—Goller-Sojourner is
distressed by his “boy tits”—and the race politics are moving. At
one point, he proudly lifts his head into the spotlight with a beatific
grin and announces: “I am white because the first people who loved me
were white.” That moment is touching and troubling and has the clear,
true ring of an idea being articulated for the very first time.
Goller-Sojourner is obviously nervous onstage, and possibly a little
uneasy with Tyrone Brown’s direction, which mostly involves standing in
different spots and talking. Aspects of the play, like a powerful
meditation on the near-OCD thinking he brings to his daily weigh-ins,
and a hilarious explanation of how a Hawaii trip that happened to
coincide with the 1984 Olympics resulted in an epic fast-food binge and
purge, are sharp, but the whole feels more like a character sketch than
a defined story arc. Sitting in Circles is an outline for a
groundbreaking play. PAUL CONSTANT
A Streetcar Named Desire
Intiman Theatre
Through Aug 2.
“I want to find the humor in Stanley,” director Sheila Daniels told
me in an interview a few weeks before Streetcar opened. “Brando
didn’t find it.”
Daniels—and actor Jonno Roberts—did. Those able to tear
themselves from the image of Saint Brando will see new dimensions in
Tennessee Williams’s icon of masculine inadequacy and rage. He’s
funny and loutish—still a sexual tiger, but more vulnerable. This
Streetcar inspires thoughts of a prequel, when we find out how
Stanley became Stanley.
Daniels’s production also shines a light on Mitch, mostly thanks to
Tim True, who plays the victim of Blanche’s dishonesty and Stanley’s
cruelty with a sad, mumbling grace. Angela Pierce as Blanche, gives a
slick, orthodox performance, and sails through Blanche’s late-play mad
scenes without succumbing to the crazy-person caricature that has
wrecked so many Blanches, Ophelias, and Lears. Chelsea Rives is a quiet
triumph, keeping Stella simple and doomed.
The wound in this Streetcar—and it’s a gaping,
festering one—is the “Blue Piano,” the occasional music Williams
describes in his stage notes as “tinny piano being played with the
infatuated fluency of brown fingers.” Daniels and sound designer Joseph
Swartz apparently read this as “portentous chords laden with heavy
reverb that bludgeon—and occasionally make a mockery of—the
play’s pathos.” The ominous notes that followed Blanche’s revelation
that her first husband was gay are egregiously goofy.
But Daniels has coaxed quality, multihued performances out of her
actors. We will begin to remember them once we have forced ourselves to
forget that goddamned piano.
BRENDAN KILEY
