Review: Love Me at FronteraFest [theater]
By Cleve Wiese
Phillip Kreyche’s Love Me tackles some big questions: Is artistic creation an inspired act or a masturbatory self-indulgence? Are artists visionaries or control freaks? For that matter, do people fall in love with other (real) people or with their own psychological projections?
This unnerving new play explores these age-old anxieties through the more-or-less true story of Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka (played by Kreyche - also the production’s writer, director, lighting designer, and set designer), a shell-shocked WWI veteran teaching art in Dresden during the 1920s. Kokoschka attempts to overcome a lingering obsession with former lover Alma Mahler, wife of the famous composer, by commissioning a life-sized mannequin made in her image. Although the addled professor hopes this passive effigy will enable him to re-stage the scene of his traumatic rejection on his own terms, the intended power reversal soon backfires when the doll - played in appropriately grotesque, spandex-clad form by Aisa Palomares - comes alive and begins asserting a nightmarish authority of its own over his quickly unraveling mind.
Kreyche’s script nicely foregrounds the parallels between Kokoschka's various internal crises and obsessions - for instance, between his traumatic memories of war and his traumatic memories of love; between his mental image of Alma Mahler and his mental image of dimly remembered childhood fantasies; between his artistic drive and his growing impulse towards social isolation. In a parallel sense, the period piece plays up the tension between its setting in postwar Germany and the highly noticeable conditions of it’s present day performance. So effectively does it blur this line, in fact, that viewers may have a hard time determining where wry meta-theatrical commentary ends and carelessness begins: Is the clearly marked Public Storage box that the mannequin arrives in a deliberate anachronism or an irritating oversight? Are the jarring bursts of profanity meant to seem so artificial and unconvincing?
Either way, the play provides ample food for thought, and its least persuasive moments - such as the overwrought psychological asides delivered by Kokoschka’s lovesick maid Hulda (Jayme Ramsay) - are often among its most memorable and interesting, even if they don’t gel within the performance. The play’s surreal, Eyes Wide Shut-like climatic party scene is well staged and downright eerie enough to make it alone worth the price of admission, and a solid supporting cast rounds out a worthwhile evening of theater.
Love Me runs Jan 23rd at 2:00pm, Jan 27th at 9:00pm, and Jan 30th at 6:00pm at the Blue Theatre.
