It’s hard to blame playwright Jordan Harrison for wanting to wrap his brain around Leni Riefenstahl with his play, Amazons and Their Men. More than four years after her death at age 101, the endlessly controversial German filmmaker remains a moral conundrum, a historical figure more slippery than a sasquatch.
Riefenstahl was a dancer and actress who, in the early 1930s, became a film director for the ascendant Third Reich. Today, she remains famous—or infamous—for capturing the Nazi rallies in Nuremberg and beyond (resulting in the stunning and propagandistic Triumph of the Will) and filming the 1936 Berlin Olympics (resulting in Olympia, which virtually invented sports photography and cinematography). For reasons that are obvious and not so, many feel Riefenstahl was complicit in the crimes of Hitler and his henchmen, while Riefenstahl’s own garrulous memoir (running over 1,000 pages) paints her as a mere artist, consummately apolitical, a compulsive cineaste oblivious to—if swept up by—history. In 2004, I directed The Imaginary, All-True Leni Riefenstahl Show, a play about Riefenstahl addressing her legacy’s chief question: Is it possible to separate great art from the abhorrent politics of the artist?
Harrison zooms past this question. His interest is in Riefenstahl’s effort to make a film about Penthesilia, the tragic Amazon queen memorialized in the early 19th century by German dramatist Heinrich von Kleist. Reports vary as to how much film Riefenstahl shot, but that’s irrelevant: in a dramatic masterstroke, the playwright imagines Riefenstahl’s film as it could have been, especially with the obstreperous filmmaker in the lead.
And Harrison and director Ken Rus Schmoll hit pay dirt with Rebecca Wisocky as Riefenstahl. Despite stylistic inconsistencies in the 75-minute work (sometimes high camp; sometimes squishy melodrama), Wisocky is pure bedrock: endearingly insouciant, yet blood-curdling.
It can be hard to ensure accuracy regarding all things Riefenstahl, so I’ll assume its Harrison’s conceit to imagine her hiring a Jew, called The Man (Brian Sgambati), to play opposite her in the film; to conceive of her sister, called The Extra (Heidi Schreck), as a lesbian (she did have a brother, though); and to picture Riefenstahl hiring a young telegram deliverer, called The Boy (Gio Perez), plunked into the film as well. It seems hackneyed to report that the men, essentially trapped in Riefenstahl’s universe (lest they be sent to a work camp) fall in love, yet Harrison unfurls that plot point with delicacy. It also triggers every wonderful, horrible element of Riefenstahl’s personality as her vaunted relationship with the Nazis begins to sour. And all of this is smartly amplified by Sue Rees’ main set piece: an ekkyklema, or moving platform, and titled projections.
Sgambati, Schreck and Perez are also pitch-perfect. Sgambati’s stentorian, overmodulated voice makes him the quintessential Riefenstahlian he-man, redolent of the men with whom she co-starred in silent action pictures in the 1920s. Schreck exudes the meek subservience all Riefenstahl acolytes needed down to a science in order to survive. Petite as a sprite, Perez exemplifies the drive for physical perfection Riefenstahl demanded in all she did, including photographing the Nuba in Africa and the underwater films of reefs and fish that symbolized her deeply frustrating postwar years.
Harrison offers neither answers nor apologies for Riefenstahl, which is good, for she deserves neither. What she deserves is exploration, and, as in Harrison’s Doris to Darlene, currently running at Playwrights Horizons, the playwright overuses third-person narrative technique to chart the journey. Fortunately, this time Harrison’s focus is clearer, and he doesn’t shrink away from writing soaring revelatory scenes. Might that have been a triumph of the will?
Through Jan. 26. Ohio Theater, 66 Wooster St. (betw. Spring & Broome Sts.), 212-352-3101; $25.
Riefenstahl was a dancer and actress who, in the early 1930s, became a film director for the ascendant Third Reich. Today, she remains famous—or infamous—for capturing the Nazi rallies in Nuremberg and beyond (resulting in the stunning and propagandistic Triumph of the Will) and filming the 1936 Berlin Olympics (resulting in Olympia, which virtually invented sports photography and cinematography). For reasons that are obvious and not so, many feel Riefenstahl was complicit in the crimes of Hitler and his henchmen, while Riefenstahl’s own garrulous memoir (running over 1,000 pages) paints her as a mere artist, consummately apolitical, a compulsive cineaste oblivious to—if swept up by—history. In 2004, I directed The Imaginary, All-True Leni Riefenstahl Show, a play about Riefenstahl addressing her legacy’s chief question: Is it possible to separate great art from the abhorrent politics of the artist?
Harrison zooms past this question. His interest is in Riefenstahl’s effort to make a film about Penthesilia, the tragic Amazon queen memorialized in the early 19th century by German dramatist Heinrich von Kleist. Reports vary as to how much film Riefenstahl shot, but that’s irrelevant: in a dramatic masterstroke, the playwright imagines Riefenstahl’s film as it could have been, especially with the obstreperous filmmaker in the lead.
And Harrison and director Ken Rus Schmoll hit pay dirt with Rebecca Wisocky as Riefenstahl. Despite stylistic inconsistencies in the 75-minute work (sometimes high camp; sometimes squishy melodrama), Wisocky is pure bedrock: endearingly insouciant, yet blood-curdling.
It can be hard to ensure accuracy regarding all things Riefenstahl, so I’ll assume its Harrison’s conceit to imagine her hiring a Jew, called The Man (Brian Sgambati), to play opposite her in the film; to conceive of her sister, called The Extra (Heidi Schreck), as a lesbian (she did have a brother, though); and to picture Riefenstahl hiring a young telegram deliverer, called The Boy (Gio Perez), plunked into the film as well. It seems hackneyed to report that the men, essentially trapped in Riefenstahl’s universe (lest they be sent to a work camp) fall in love, yet Harrison unfurls that plot point with delicacy. It also triggers every wonderful, horrible element of Riefenstahl’s personality as her vaunted relationship with the Nazis begins to sour. And all of this is smartly amplified by Sue Rees’ main set piece: an ekkyklema, or moving platform, and titled projections.
Sgambati, Schreck and Perez are also pitch-perfect. Sgambati’s stentorian, overmodulated voice makes him the quintessential Riefenstahlian he-man, redolent of the men with whom she co-starred in silent action pictures in the 1920s. Schreck exudes the meek subservience all Riefenstahl acolytes needed down to a science in order to survive. Petite as a sprite, Perez exemplifies the drive for physical perfection Riefenstahl demanded in all she did, including photographing the Nuba in Africa and the underwater films of reefs and fish that symbolized her deeply frustrating postwar years.
Harrison offers neither answers nor apologies for Riefenstahl, which is good, for she deserves neither. What she deserves is exploration, and, as in Harrison’s Doris to Darlene, currently running at Playwrights Horizons, the playwright overuses third-person narrative technique to chart the journey. Fortunately, this time Harrison’s focus is clearer, and he doesn’t shrink away from writing soaring revelatory scenes. Might that have been a triumph of the will?
Through Jan. 26. Ohio Theater, 66 Wooster St. (betw. Spring & Broome Sts.), 212-352-3101; $25.
