35. SONTAG: REBORN
Let’s
be honest. How familiar are you with the writing of the late Susan Sontag
(1933-2004), the prolific writer, activist, and public intellectual you may
remember for the blaze of white hair across the front of her dark mane (some
call it a “skunk stripe”). If you’re a Sontag fan, or are at least
semi-conversant with her life and thoughts, you will probably love SONTAG: REBORN, a
75-minute, intermissionless, one-woman presentation of material carefully
culled by Moe Angelos—the actress who convincingly plays Sontag—from the
writer’s journals; these were edited by her son, David Rieff, as REBORN and AS CONSCIOUSNESS IS HARNESSED TO
FLESH: JOURNALS AND NOTEBOOKS. If you know her
as I did, as a cultural phenomenon of whom I was persistently aware but whose
work never called to me, you will, perhaps, not love the content of this show
so much. But whoever you are, it will be hard not to appreciate the considerable
talent that the Builders Association and director Marianne Weems have put into
producing the play at the New York Theatre Workshop.
Sontag is seen both as her mature
self and her younger self, the former in an almost hologram-like black and
white video projection that overlooks the stage; as the smoke from her
cigarette rises, the mature, sophisticated Sontag interacts, sometimes contentiously,
with her optimistic but always questioning live and girlish presence, itself behind a scrim.
The stage is dressed by designer Joshua Higgason primarily with a large
desk and many books, as videos, seen on multiple transparent surfaces that
occasionally overlap each other, provide the primary visual interest. Austin
Switzer’s projection designs are among the most technically advanced I’ve seen, even in
a time when projections are becoming a primary tool of theatrical design.
Angelos plays Sontag from 1947 to 1963 (or ages 15 to
31), and the years are ticked off by the video Sontag, who informs us of all
the remarkable milestones in this brilliant woman’s early career: her teenage
precocity while growing up in Sherman Oaks, California; her one-time meeting with
Thomas Mann, when she stole a cigarette he was smoking; the schools she went
to; the multiple degrees she acquired; the books she read and the writers she
admired; the plays and movies she saw; her failed marriage of eight years to
sociologist Philip Rieff, whom she wed ten days after she met him (when she was 19); the birth of
her child, David; her lesbian affairs, notably with a woman named H she
met at Berkeley, and the love of her life, painter-playwright, Maria Irene
Fornes; her European travels; the New
York Times’s dismissal of her
first novel, BENEFACTORS, when she was 30; and the success of her “Notes on
Camp” essay in Partisan Review, which
finally brought her wide acclaim. We even see an electronically enhanced vision
of her hand writing her journals, with the sentences magically illuminated as pen touches
paper.
The spoken content seems entirely to
have been drawn from Sontag’s journals, so there are highly intimate
revelations, such as her noting a time she masturbated and then examined her c—t, as she calls it,
in the mirror. She was constantly judging her own work, about which she felt
insecure, as well as that of others. But the play shoots out so many rapidly
spoken nuggets of information and ideas that it becomes difficult to catch them
all, and the effect, especially for those unfamiliar with the material,
eventually grows tedious.
Still, Angelos’s performance, while never overly showy
(except when she captures the accents of Mann or Fornes), remains compelling;
when Sontag’s comments register, they do so effectively, possibly
inspiring some to want to seek out her work and get to know her better. But unless
you are already a Sontag follower, I doubt that this play makes her writing and
ideas scintillating enough to spark a rediscover Sontag movement. I remain
content to have gotten whatever snippets of the writer I could from SONTAG:
REBORN and let those more literarily inclined explore Sontag to their hearts' content.
