Frida…A Self Portrait, this critic feared, would be a sop to Fridamaniacs, which she is not. Yet, at the end of the night, she turned to her husband and said, “I do not think I will ever see better acting than that.”
Frida is the brainchild of Vanessa Severo, who wrote and performs the one-woman show. Her entanglement with the Mexican surrealist folkloric painter Frida Kahlo began when a friend commented on their physical resemblance. From there, Severo found more and more parallels between the painter’s life and her own charming persona, which she weaves throughout the show.
It’s helpful to go into Frida with a knowledge of the artist’s life. After she overcame polio as a child, which required her to do painful physical therapy exercises for her affected leg, at 19, she survived a horrific accident: a tram slammed into the bus she was riding on, pinning her under the wreckage, crushing bones throughout her body, and sending a metal pole through her reproductive organs. It was this last injury that doctors said would preclude her from carrying a child to term. She would live with often disabling pain for the rest of her life.
Yet, in the two years she spent bedbound after the accident, Frida began to paint—prolifically, even obsessively, primarily self-portraits—reproducing herself in a way she might never do biologically. When the young woman approached established artist Diego Rivera for feedback on her work, a catastrophically dysfunctional romance began.
Severo’s framing for Frida’s story is that she is giving a last interview as the artist lies dying. The set, designed by Jacqueline Penrod, is filled with three clotheslines, heavy with laundry that represents Frida in different stages of her life, her lovers, and the other players in her story. By the clothes on the line and the clothes she wears, courtesy of costume designer Katherine Davis, Frida tries out different versions of herself. The self, after all, is less a porcelain tchotchke on the mantel and more the dancing flame in the hearth, known by its patterns even through countless changes; this is why Frida never tired of doing self-portraits, and why Severo never tires of playing Frida.
Some of Severo’s best acting is in her wordless montage of married life with Rivera. Four white onesies come down from the clothesline in turn. Each one she cradles against her abdomen, only for it to fall to the floor with a sickening plop. Frustrated, she runs to Diego’s suit on the line. By some magic, Severo turns puppeteer as well as actor, bringing Diego’s wandering hand to life even as Frida curls up against his chest. When she swats his hand away, it wanders to another dress on the clothesline. So begins a cycle of jealousy and revenge that culminates in an ultimate act of betrayal by Diego. Severo’s scream upon its discovery will stay with audience members for a long time. Another highlight of an outstanding performance is how she conveys Frida as a woman accustomed to pain who is, at the end of her life, suddenly pushed into agony even she thought impossible.
Only so much can be conveyed in 75 minutes about a life, but a notable omission is Kahlo’s extensive left-wing political engagement. Best known in popular culture is her brief affair with exiled Soviet leader Leon Trotsky, shortly after Rivera’s advocacy won him and his long-suffering wife asylum in Mexico; given the timing, shortly after that “ultimate betrayal,” this has been suggested as Frida’s revenge. Her only work exhibited in D.C, at the NMWA, is her parting gift to/parting shot at Trotsky. The self-portrait, hung in his office, was a silent witness to his assassination (infamously, by pickax, also on display in D.C.).
Frida, with characteristic volatility, later switched sides to Stalin, who had ordered the murder.
For all the drama and color of Frida’s life, the crux of the show is Severo’s quest to understand the artist and herself. In a world that sneers at feelings of kinship with famous figures as “parasocial relationships,” that proclaims the dangers of meeting one’s heroes, Severo reclaims the intertwined human needs to know ourselves and find ourselves reflected in others. It is a mystical experience, transcending time and death.
Somewhere, Frida must be well pleased.
Frida…A Self Portrait, written by Vanessa Severo and directed by Joanie Schultz, is playing through Nov. 8 at Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Klein Theatre, 450 7th St. NW. shakespearetheatre.org. Tickets start at $97.
