>>PREVIEW
THE BLUE LIGHT
Alberta Theatre Projects
playRites Festival
Written by Mieko Ouchi
Runs until March 4
Martha Cohen Theatre
(Epcor Centre)
When Michael Moore won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2004 for Fahrenheit 9/11, many people (including Moore) were taken by surprise. Clearly, his angry, uneven anti-Bush documentary had been named best picture based on its political viewpoint, not its artistic merit. Of course, historically, there are plenty of works that have received accolades more for the important messages they delivered than for the artistry of the delivery. But it cuts both ways.
Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s cinematic record of the Nazi party’s 1934 Nuremberg rally, is a masterful piece of documentary filmmaking and a landmark work of propaganda, yet it is also reviled for its glorification of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Even while its technique and style have been admired and imitated, it made Riefenstahl a pariah in the film industry from the Second World War right up until her death on September 8, 2003 at the age of 101.
Had she later repented her role in glamorizing one of the most horrific regimes in history, had she shown some remorse, over time she might have been forgiven. But she spent the larger part of her long life stubbornly insisting that she was an artist who shouldn’t be made to answer for the political content of her films. Riefenstahl’s story raises the enduring question of whether art should be judged by purely esthetic standards, or if the artist also has a moral obligation.
Alberta playwright and filmmaker Mieko Ouchi is among those film students who feels conflicted about Riefenstahl, not least because the German director was one of the few female directors in the early days of cinema and the first to attain international renown. "She’s a really controversial figure for a lot of women filmmakers," says Ouchi. "It’s like, ‘Here’s your role model, but she made films that supported fascism.’"
Those mixed feelings led Ouchi to write The Blue Light, a new play about Riefenstahl’s life making its première at Alberta Theatre Projects’ 20th annual playRites festival.
The drama takes its title from Riefenstahl’s first film as director, a romantic mountain fairy tale in which she also starred – a reminder that, apart from the three propaganda pieces she created for the Nazi party, she was a nonpolitical filmmaker who began her career making dramatic movies and ended it by shooting documentaries on African tribes and undersea life. Yet, thanks to her association with the Nazis, all her work – including her masterpiece Olympia, a celebration of the 1936 Berlin Olympics which remains one of the greatest sports documentaries ever made – has been perceived, in retrospect, to contain what critic Susan Sontag and others have called a fascist esthetic. And certainly, it was her early films as an actor and dancer, entries in the German mountain-adventure genre directed by Arnold Fanck and G.W. Pabst, which won the admiration of Hitler and led to her assignments to shoot Nazi agitprop.
Ouchi’s play tells Riefenstahl’s life story in flashbacks, framed by a fictional scene in which the elderly director makes one last-ditch attempt to pitch her real-life pet project, a film about the Amazon queen Penthesilea, to an ambivalent young woman producer in Hollywood. As the ailing Riefenstahl collapses in the producer’s office, we’re transported back to her formative years as a dancer, her first attempts at filmmaking, her friendships with the Fuhrer and his propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, and her Icarus-like plummet that began in 1938, when she visited Hollywood to promote Olympia, only to be treated like poison – Nazi Germany having just begun to reveal the barbaric viciousness of its anti-Semitism.
ATP’s production is directed by Ron Jenkins – who also staged Ouchi’s previous playRites play, 2003’s The Red Priest – and stars triple Betty Mitchell Award winner Kate Hennig as Leni. It’s a larger-than-life role and a difficult one – even apart from her notoriety as the Nazis’ golden girl, Riefenstahl was an unlikable woman with a steely determination and little feeling for others.
"She had balls," says Hennig. "She had no fear. Or whatever fear she had, she just ran straight into it. And she was a huge narcissist. Every person she left in her wake was just an appendage of her desire to move forward and her animal need to succeed. She’s a crazy woman."
Still, as a professional actor, Hennig can understand to some extent why Riefenstahl agreed to make propaganda. "God knows, for artists, some of the most lucrative jobs, for instance in the voice-over industry, can be doing voice-overs for political parties you don’t agree with, but all the same you need to make a living. Certainly, there are people who say, ‘No, I will not make a commercial for this, or for certain products.’ But there are other people who have kids at home and a mortgage to pay, and this is the only job they have. Artists are so poorly paid, and (Riefenstahl) was getting money, backing for films, from the Nazi party. She’d didn’t only make these documentaries for the Third Reich, but she was also able to work on her own dramatic projects. So she got to create her art as well as propaganda for them."
But it’s hard to buy Riefenstahl’s argument that she was just a hired camera and didn’t know anything about Nazi policies. "She got personal telegrams from Hitler, she was photographed at his house, she and Goebbels had some kind of indeterminate relationship, which was rumoured at," notes Hennig. "She was right in there, and for her to deny that, she must have built up this huge wall of defence within herself."
Ouchi’s challenge as a playwright was to find the crack in that wall. There’s little sign of it in Riefenstahl’s massive autobiography, The Sieve of Time, or in Ray Müller’s equally massive (and excellent) 1994 documentary, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl. But Ouchi finally found a hint of vulnerability when she chanced upon a rerun of the classic CBC TV news show, This Hour Has Seven Days.
"I caught an interview that they did with Leni Riefenstahl, and as she talked about her brother, she started to cry. It was the only time, in all the interviews I’d seen of her, that I’d seen her cry. I thought there was something significant there."
Riefenstahl’s brother Heinz served as a soldier during the Second World War and died on the Russian front. Her beloved father also died during the war, under shadowy circumstances. "I thought that maybe that’s where the war touched her on a personal level, that was the way she was able to understand it," says Ouchi. "I thought if she had any doubts, maybe this was where they lived. Perhaps what she contributed to, led to her brother’s death. But it’s speculation, of course."
Heinz and the father appear in Ouchi’s play, the former played by Rylan Wilkie, the latter by Duval Lang, who also portrays Walt Disney and Hitler. "We’ll see what connections the audience makes," jokes Ouchi of Lang’s three roles.
She says she initially hesitated at dramatizing a figure as hated as the Nazi dictator. "It’s a pretty daunting idea to write scenes for Adolf Hitler, but it seemed it had to happen – he’s such a huge part of her life and he needs to be there." Disney, meanwhile, makes a cameo appearance as one of the few Hollywood celebrities who publicly received Riefenstahl during her ill-starred L.A. visit in ’38.
The cast is rounded out by Natascha Girgis and Trevor Leigh. After its Calgary debut, the play will get a second production this winter with Jenkins’s company, Workshop West Theatre, in Ouchi’s home city of Edmonton.
Ouchi is coming back to playRites this year with an added sheen of prestige. The Red Priest, her play about the latter days of Vivaldi, was nominated for a Governor General’s Award in 2004 and subsequently received a Toronto production at the Tarragon Theatre last year. "We sold out our entire six-week run and got a glowing review in Variety, which really opened up the play to a whole other market," she says. "It’s also been translated into Japanese." And 2005 was also a banner year in other ways for Ouchi. Minor Keys, her documentary on child violin prodigies, aired on CBC’s The Nature of Things with Dr. David Suzuki.
Currently she’s writing a TV series called Saffron on spec for Vision Television and is hoping to begin work on her next play this summer. Will it add to the Red Priest-Blue Light colour scheme? "Ironically, that was not planned," says Ouchi with a laugh. "Maybe I should write a third one with a colour and make it a trilogy."
PlayRites expands playbill for its 20th year
To celebrate its 20th anniversary, playRites has adopted a new structure for the first time since 1989. Instead of four full productions of new Canadian plays, the festival is expanding to five shows. Three of the plays will be presented on its mainstage, the Martha Cohen Theatre in the Epcor Centre. The other two, of a more unconventional nature, will be performed on the BD&P Stage 2 – better known as the Engineered Air Theatre. These are the shows:
MAINSTAGE
· Hippies and Bolsheviks by Amiel Gladstone – see preview in this issue.
· The Blue Light by Mieko Ouchi.
· Picking Up Chekhov by Mansel Robinson – see preview in this issue.
SECOND STAGE
· Diplomatic Immunities by Mammalian Diving Reflex – an interactive live performance with video, developed by the Toronto theatre company in conjunction with ATP.
· Le Gros Spectacle by The Wind-up Dames – a new comedy by Calgary duo Renée Amber and Brieanna Moench.
Check Fast Forward’s listings for dates and ticket information. |
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