EXIT THE KING
Eclipse Theatre Company
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Berenger has so mismanaged his kingdom that it might not survive him. But then he almost craves such chaos–he’d take the kingdom with him if he could. Helping him to accept the end are his doctor and his first wife, Queen Marguerite, a woman of no illusions. Though their countdown to his death seems coldly efficient (“You will die at the end of the play”), it’s also practical and oddly comforting. By contrast the cloying devotion of Berenger’s second wife, Queen Marie, seems selfish and sentimental: she’s afraid to lose him because she’ll lose herself.
Ionesco depicts the royal extinction as no nobler than any other–as always, death is inconvenient and premature. Seething with self-pity and self-doubt, Berenger rages, denies, and bargains, wavering between wanting the world destroyed and wanting it preserved so that it can remember him. Above all he clings frantically to the life around him: in a lovely scene, Berenger listens as his servant recites her endless drudgery–but the king, on the threshold of death, sees what she cannot, the everyday miracles we take for granted.
If death haunts Berenger, it plagued artist Frida Kahlo. Court Theatre’s production of Frida: The Last Portrait, written and first performed by Donna Blue Lachman at Blue Rider Theater in 1987, offers a pictorial 75-minute sketch of the Mexican portraitist, who died in 1954 at only 47. Tormented invalid, socialist sympathizer, famed hostess, and anguished wife of muralist Diego Rivera, Kahlo was as colorful as her 200 vibrant canvases, most of them self-portraits also featuring her pet monkeys.
The most revealing views of Kahlo come from the parts of Mary Zimmerman’s artful staging that work–from set designer Jeff Bauer’s flower-painted hacienda and skeletons hovering above the audience, from Rita Pietraszek’s tropical lighting, and from slide projections of Kahlo’s lush, impassive self-portraits. Multihued streamers suggest Kahlo’s delight in color, and an overlong dream sequence in dance shows the artist in a fantasy of regeneration through art complete with candles on the bedposts, a descending parasol, and gold powder sprinkled from above. A splendid mural by Marcos Raya fairly explodes on the theater’s gray exterior, and the lobby features a rainbow-rich collection of diverse works by five artists inspired by Kahlo.
