My favorite and most memorable experiences in the theater come when an actor takes an ordinary object and, via a wondrous alchemy of physical craft, emotional investment, and collective imagination, animates it and transforms it into something else. I still remember vividly a scene from Mary Zimmerman’s The Secret in the Wings – which I saw in Chicago two decades ago – in which a picture frame, lifted horizontally, “drowned” one of the characters: it was a simple, low-tech, and utterly devastating solution to the challenge of making a character “sink” under water. Such moments of theatrical magic remind me of why I love live theater: at its best (and often simplest), it takes me back to a childlike imaginative state of wonder and awe.
Frida…A Self Portrait has several similar moments of captivating, breathtaking theatrical magic. Written and performed by the incomparable Vanessa Severo, and directed by Joanie Schultz, the play paints a theatrical self-portrait of Frida Kahlo, whose own oeuvre consisted overwhelmingly of painted self portraits. Severo opens the performance by explaining that she originally became interested in Kahlo because she had often been told that she looked like the painter (the resemblance is, in fact, striking, and enhanced by Katherine Davis’s spot-on costume designs); a deep dive into Kahlo’s diaries and letters brought Severo to see deeper connections to Kahlo’s life and work, as a woman artist who “feels bizarre and flawed” in similar ways. She then steps into the role of Kahlo to unfold the story of her remarkably tragic life – from her struggles to recover from childhood polio, through her lifelong pain from a terrible bus accident as a young adult, to her turbulent marriage to Diego Rivera, who had multiple affairs, including one with her younger sister – while also emphasizing Kahlo’s courage, humor-filled vivacity, and vibrant artistic sensibility.
Severo makes effective use of Suzuki movement technique to corporealize Kahlo’s physical and emotional pain. The Suzuki method is a notoriously difficult one to master – it involves precise control of musculature and breathing to create both athletic movement and energy-filled stillness – and her choice to embody physical agony and disability through a virtuosic display of a technique grounded in the painful disciplining of the body is both apt and mesmerizing. It also connects with one of the great insights that comes from Kahlo’s life story, which is that artistic genius will out even in the most adverse of circumstances.
In the course of the play, Severo also steps in and out of other characters in the story, using clothes and other props hung on clotheslines across the stage to swiftly transform herself, for example, into the mustachio’d German father who disciplined the young Kahlo, or into the doctor who treated Kahlo after the bus accident. As a world-building device, the clothesline – which scenic designer Jacqueline Penrod frames with a huge four poster bed in exaggerated perspective – is a beautiful choice, and Severo and Schultz use it in endlessly inventive ways, sometimes to establish the “where” of the scene, sometimes to stand in for an absent character, sometimes to provide a prop or costume for use in the storytelling, and at one point even to reference one of Kahlo’s paintings. One of the transformative moments from this performance that I know will linger long in memory comes when Kahlo, having suffered a series of miscarriages (indicated with admirable economy through the use of white baby clothes), seeks comfort in the arms of her husband: Severo puts one arm through the jacket hanging on the clothesline that stands in for Rivera and brings it instantly to life, caressing herself as she grieves.
Utterly engaging and original in both form and content, Frida…A Self Portrait not only reanimates the life of a key 20th-century artist, but also tells a story that continues to resonate: one of a person marginalized by dominant culture who bravely and insistently makes herself and her lived experience visible, through resilient self-expression and self-representation.
The Pittsburgh Tatler 