Modotti, by Wendy Beckett

Let me begin by saying that I have very little inclination toward playgoing. I trace this in part to my early days as a freelance cultural journalist, when I served a stint as third-string theater critic for the Village Voice, 1967-68. (See my previous post on that subject.) As low man on the totem pole I rarely got to see the most exciting productions, mostly a lot of lesser stuff — Shakespeare in church basements, debuts of long-forgotten one-acts, and such. I reviewed about 150 performances in the space of 18 months, and have rarely set foot inside a theater since if it meant watching actors on stage.

Additionally, while I enjoy classical drama from many cultures, what interest I have in contemporary plays tends toward the experimental end of the spectrum: Ionesco, Genet, Beckett, Pinter. Having learned the lesson of Brechtian alienation, I can’t unlearn it; having accepted the breaching of the fourth wall, I can’t rebuild it; and having embraced the Artaudian theater of cruelty and the surreal theater of the absurd, I can’t simply plug back into realist mode and pretend to enchantment with a conventional story straighforwardly told.

Suspension of disbelief gets hard to recover as an attitude once you move past it. So traditional theater, with its mandatory, predictable arcs of narrative and character, leaves me cold. (As does a great deal of mainstream film.) Not long ago I went to see a Broadway revival of Eric Bogosian’s vastly overrated Talk Radio. If a friend hadn’t invited me along and bought the ticket, I’d have left after the first ten minutes of this creaker; once you realize how it’s going to come out, why watch the machine at work?

Alysia Reiner as Tina Modotti. Photo: Joan Marcus

Still, a play about the relationship between Edward Weston and Tina Modotti does fall squarely within my bailiwick (especially given those drama-critic creds from what now seems another lifetime), so how could I resist a comp for the world premiere opening night of Modotti on June 8? At the very least, the creation and production of such a work — like the bizarre Arbus biopic/fantasy Fur — bespeaks recognition of photographers as significant cultural figures whose private and professional lives merit our attention. So, as an index of photography’s status within our overall cultural consciousness, this is a certifiable good thing, on a par with the publication of biographies of photographers, though of course increased quantity does not guarantee quality.

With that said, I approached Modotti, by Wendy Beckett (no relation to Samuel), in the spirit with which I still try to engage with any work of art in any medium: leaving my baggage at the door, open to whatever it had to offer, and, optimistically, prepared to be pleasantly surprised.

I certainly enjoyed my first visit to Theater Row, at 410 W. 42nd St. in Manhattan. This is a theater multiplex, with five simultaneous productions running in five 200-seat mini-theaters with plush seats, additional spaces for staged readings, a comfortable lounge, and all the amenities of a Broadway theater. Definitely an improvement over the often ramshackle, makeshift spaces I recall of my theater-critic days; I’ve gotten old enough that the rigors of wooden folding chairs have long since lost their appeal.

At that moment Theater Row was showing Othello, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and three new plays, including Modotti, the last of these in a “limited off-Broadway engagement” (June 8-July 3) at the Acorn Theater, one of Theater Row’s stages. I accepted a souvenir fan and a Playbill, found my back-row seat, and, surveying the theater, realized that it had excellent lines of sight from every seat. John McDermott’s elegantly simple set, all in tones of gray, awaited animation. Regrettably, though actors came and went thereon for the next several hours, it never came alive.

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Modotti has, as its basic problem, its author’s desire to combine four plays in one. These are, in order of their appearance:

• the complete life story of Tina Modotti, including her photography (critical biography);

• the romance between Modotti and Edward Weston (love story);

• Weston and Modotti’s artistic relationship to the transition in photographic practice from pictorialism to modernism (theater of ideas);

• plus the involvement of Modotti and various others in the fractious, tormented politics of the Communist Party in the U.S., Mexico, Spain, and the Soviet Union (theater of ideas again — but very different ideas).

Alysia Reiner as Tina Modotti, Jack Gwaltney as Edward Weston. Photo: Joan Marcus

It may be inconceivable to consider Modotti in a substantial way without addressing these aspects of her life and work. But this combination asks the impossible of a playwright of only modest talent, like Beckett; it would put a strain even on one with real gifts.

Beckett’s decision to put the emphasis on Modotti’s communist commitment, even if unavoidable, proved particularly unwise from a dramaturgical standpoint. Only a rare theater-goer would bring to this production the backstory knowledge of the covert activities of author Bertram Wolfe (Three Who Made a Revolution) and his wife Ella on behalf of the U. S. Communist Party (CPUSA), the difficult relationship between the CPUSA and the Comintern, the Stalinist-Trotskyite schism and its repercussions, Trotsky’s flight to Mexico and assassination there, the NKVD’s shameful executions of Loyalist volunteers in Spain, the crisis within the party generated by the Stalin-Hitler pact, the convoluted ins and outs of Mexican left-wing politics, and Modotti’s and Diego Rivera’s involvement therein.

Alysia Reiner and Mark Zeisler in Modotti. Photo: Joan Marcus

For those who know of all this in some detail, like me, Beckett’s sketchy version must necessarily seem thin and devoid of nuance. For those who don’t, it’ll almost certainly come across as a jumble of loony-left allegiance-shifting, bad faith, betrayal, and rationalizing of lesser/greater evils. And of all forums in which to explicate these intricacies, the stage strikes me as absolutely the least promising.

For a play about such tumultuous times, Modotti has a strangely lifeless quality onstage. This despite the fact that the play includes a painfully stiff political rally, an equally unconvincing Weston/Modotti photo-show opening, a hokey sidewalk assassination by gunshot, a melodramatic prison interrogation, and a brief vignette showing Modotti acting as nurse on a Spanish Civil War battlefield. Many of these scenes come amidst an episodic effort to synopsize Modotti’s subsequent love life, deportation from Mexico to Berlin, sojourn in Spain, return to Mexico, and other events through which no coherent connective thread gets woven. Biographically true or not, they fail to make dramaturgical sense.

Modotti at the Acorn Theatre. Photo: Joan Marcus

Weston disappeared from Modotti’s life after he left Mexico in 1926 to make California his permanent home. He has no role in the political component of the drama, save as an apolitical art-for-art’s-sake foil to Modotti’s engagé posture. Yet, having made it so central to the first act, Beckett cannot relinquish the love-story aspect of her project, so she keeps Weston popping up throughout the second act, periodically spotlit on a darkened stage, commenting on the occasional postcard he receives from her or news he hears about her (or the absence of communication from her), as if their relationship were somehow still active.

Indeed, he has the last word in the play, speaking of Modotti as the love of his life when news of her death reaches him in 1942. In real life, of course, he’d been unfaithful to Modotti when he returned briefly to California in 1924, and after leaving Modotti had moved on to numerous others, notably Sonya Noskowiak and ultimately Charis Wilson. (Ben Maddow, one of his biographers, described Weston as “sexually greedy.”) In the 1930s, years after he’d parted from Modotti but prior to the start of his involvement with Wilson, Weston spoke of Margrethe Mather, his lover at the time he met Modotti, as the most important woman in his life up till then, effectively marginalizing Modotti.

Marco Greco, Alysia Reiner, Andy Paris and Mark Zeisler in Modotti). Photo: Joan Marcus

Beckett also fails to present comprehensibly or at any length the contentious field of ideas of photography at the time, and what Weston inarguably and Modotti arguably achieved therein that makes him and, to a lesser extent her, reference points in the medium’s morphology. The projection of some of their pictures on the rear wall, in this production, did not help to clarify this. Instead, for anyone familiar even in passing with photo history, these images served as a reminder that Modotti was both voluptuous and diminutive where the taller Alysia Reiner, who played her here, has a Modigliani slenderness and angularity.

For that matter, Jack Gwaltney, the actor playing Weston, is close to a foot taller than the character he portrayed — much taller than Marco Greco, in the role of Diego Rivera, imposing and corpulent (over six feet tall and weighing some 300 pounds) in real life. For one who knows a bit of photo and art history this had an unsettling Alice-in-Wonderland effect, with characters of whom one has visual familiarity (even if only through pictures) arbitrarily enlarged or shrunken.

The cast of Modotti at the Acorn Theatre, Theatre Row. Photo: Joan Marcus

Good historical theater doesn’t require physical exactitude in the casting. A skilled actor in a fine script inhabits the character, persuading you to forget about such matters. Alas, the dialogue in Modotti is wooden, formulaic, predictable, and rife with anachronisms. (Example: “Take a vacation! How bourgeois is that?” Modotti exclaims to Weston in Act II. Totally.) Even brilliant acting could not have animated it.

But this cast contained no first-rate actors. Rather than embodying conviction, they merely voiced it as received, instead of felt. Small wonder; hard to recapture the blinders-on true-believer ardor of those times, especially knowing what we know now about where those naïve commitments led. Beckett’s cast seemed as bewildered by the shifting tides of artistic fashion and internecine left-wing factionalism as they left their audience. Reiner’s Modotti came across as wide-eyed precursor of the Jefferson Airplane’s “Volunteers” (“got to revolution, got to revolution”) and Gwaltney’s Weston as an early version of the Beatles’ “Revolution No. 1” (“Don’t you know that you can count me out?”) And the play as a whole seemed as much a dated period piece as would a revival of Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, without the excuse of time displacement.

Alysia Reiner and Josh Tyson. Photo: Joan Marcus

Perhaps the problem resides in the fact that the playwright tries to return us to that time, and that sociopolitical and artistic context, with no sense of irony and no attempt at satire. She takes her protagonists as seriously as they took themselves, bringing to them no deflation of their pomposities, no critical distance, and no retrospective analysis of earlier behavior — not even the mawkish kind Barbra Streisand paraded around in The Way We Were. Ideological conviction means never having to say you’re sorry.

Beckett herself acknowledges this, obliquely, in her “Director’s Note” in the Playbill: “Directing a play about Communism in current time has been a challenge, often working with ideas that were unpalatable and even comic in hindsight of the history we now understand. A non-judgemental attempt has been made to be true to the idealism of the day. . . . [A]t every turn art and politics collided.” But as playwright she does nothing to either mitigate or capitalize on that collision, while by opting to direct it herself she eliminates the possibility of someone else coming to it with a fresh eye. The Steve Martin who wrote Picasso at the Lapin Agile — wherein Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, and a distinctly Elvis-like visitor from the future discuss equally complex issues — would have done better with this source material, methinks.

Alysia Reiner in Modotti. Photo: Joan Marcus

At intermission, a stranger sat down across a coffee table from me in the lounge and asked what I thought of it so far. After confirming that he had no relation to anyone in the production, and no investment in it, I replied, “I now have some faint inkling of what a baby seal feels like getting clubbed to death by someone too inept to deliver the killing blow.” Unkind, surely, but heartfelt. My questioner seemed taken aback. Then the bell rang to summon us to the second and final act, which went on much too long. Dutiful reviewer that I am, I stayed to the end.

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(Note: Modotti’s work was rediscovered in the United States when 90 vintage prints were exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1996. Martha Chahroudi, then the museum’s curator of photography, organized the exhibit. In order to raise funds for the show, the singer Madonna auctioned off her 1963 Mercedes-Benz. Madonna has become a major collector of Modotti’s work. Prior to the presentation of her work in the U.S., Modotti’s photos have been shown in Italy, Poland, Germany, Austria and other countries. The largest exhibition of her work opened at Kunst Haus Wien in Vienna on June 30, 2010. Curated by Reinhard Schultz, it includes 250 photos, many never shown before. The exhibition is based on the collections of Galerie Bilderwelt, Berlin and Spencer Throckmorton, NYC.)