Theater review:
A fictional journey into Leni Riefenstahl's soul Insight Out's "Leni" uses the German filmmaker to explore how art can transfigure, transcend life.


Leni

Monday, October 23, 2006
RICHARD WATTENBERG

"Destruction:creation" is the theme of Insight Out's 2006-07 season, and the company couldn't start with a more appropriate play than author and director Sarah Greenman's "Leni."

This thought-provoking piece, artfully performed by JoAnn Johnson and Cecily Overman, takes us on a fictional journey into the soul of one of the most controversial of 20th-century filmmakers, Leni Riefenstahl.

An extraordinarily talented film director, Riefenstahl was closely linked to Adolph Hitler, whose Nazi Party underwrote her two most well-known movies, "Triumph of the Will" and "Olympia." Despite the propagandistic nature of these films -- especially "Triumph of the Will," which romanticized Hitler and his followers while documenting a 1934 Nazi Party rally -- Riefenstahl always insisted that she was apolitical. Claiming ignorance of Hitler's political agenda, she insisted she only wanted to make beautiful films.

The play is a fantasy representing an older Riefenstahl directing a younger Riefenstahl in an autobiographical film. The device allows Greenman to explore how art can transfigure and transcend life. As fanciful illusions corrupt her memories and dreams overtake her sense of reality, the older Riefenstahl desires a triumph of will -- the will to transform troubling aspects of her life into a beautiful cinematic fiction.

Overman adeptly captures the ambitious enthusiasm of the younger Riefenstahl. She conveys the younger Riefenstahl's fervent dedication to her art. But especially in scenes when she remorselessly interrogates the older Riefenstahl, Overman shows some of the uncompromising desire for truth that the younger Riefenstahl is unable to sustain at play's end.

As the older Riefenstahl, Johnson is sometimes the imperiously commanding film director, and, at other times, a likable eccentric abounding in worldly charm. But she is always a larger-than-life character who swells with a faith in a paradoxically monumental and ethereal ideal beauty.

To exemplify Riefenstahl's overpowering idealism, artfully integrated clips from "Triumph of the Will" and "Olympia" are projected on a screen behind the actors. While the films' degraded quality and the ominously expressionist play of shadows Glenn Fujimura's lights make on the back screen at other points in the production work to counterbalance the sweeping imagery of these clips, we don't ever lose sight of the grandiosity of Riefenstahl's dreams.

In the end, we may be repulsed by the substance of her vision, but we must still acknowledge the potential we have for being similarly intoxicated by exaggerated dreams.