The Aurora reigns supreme in Bay Area theater for intellectual debate. Never will you see flashy spectacle in the Berkeley company’s two chamber-size spaces. Instead, the Aurora specializes in dramatizing the unanswerable questions of our time, in pared-down storytelling driven by conflicts of ideas.
Its Bay Area premiere of “Leni,” which opened Thursday, March 16, exemplifies this forte, though Sarah Greenman’s play about filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, whose films Hitler supported financially and used as propaganda, is by no means perfect.
Under the direction of Jon Tracy, the show opens with one of those moments that’s possible only in the most intimate of venues: You unconsciously stiffen your whole body and muffle your breathing, lest the slightest stir should disturb the hushed magic of hallowed contract between performer and audience.
After an offstage outburst in German, Leni (Stacy Ross) enters the Aurora’s very small, upstairs space to find a simple, spare film set. She gropes about the almost pitch-black stage, surveying the ladders, stage lights and her audience with wistful wonder. Then, all at once, the stage lights flash on, violating a shared private moment: Everything is out in the open now. It’s at this instant that Leni snaps into movie director mode, barking orders. In other words, little actually happens in these initial moments, much of it inscrutable, but that testifies to the caliber of Ross’ performance; in her hands, even a nondescript sequence feels charged, sacred.
She’s joined in this two-hander by Martha Brigham as a younger incarnation of Leni, meaning that this production brings together two of the finest Bay Area actors of their generations. As the pair bicker over their different visions of their life, taking turns acting in and directing a film that, supposedly, will finally tell their story accurately, the two actors highlight related but distinct contradictions in this multifaceted figure. In Brigham’s rendering, a martinet’s brusqueness shades Leni’s every phrase — until, on a tangent, she might wax rhapsodic about Paris, her cadences all slurred and swooping. It’s a portrait of an artist we don’t often get to see women embody — a creator who’s assured and adamant in her vision but also allowed flights of artistic reverie that the play takes seriously.
Ross seasons this portrait with the wisdom of experience. She’s more practiced in her outbursts, but her Leni, having suffered interrogation upon interrogation after World War II, has also learned likability, humility. Whether Ross’ apologetic smiles are genuine or performed gets at the the play’s heart: What did Riefenstahl know about the Nazis and how they were using her films, and when? How could she not know? When postwar tribunals, when history asked her if she felt regret for making the films “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia,” what were they really asking? What, after all, does performed remorse give posterity? And to what degree were these lines of questioning influenced by Riefenstahl’s gender and beauty?
“Leni” is at its best when it dives full bore into those knotty issues, letting you ping-pong back and forth with each new point raised. It also shows Riefenstahl footage that’s so stunning, so pioneering that you weep to think what she might have gone on to create had she not come of age in the wrong time and place. (After 1954, she never directed another feature film, though she lived to be 101.)
The show falters only in its framing device. “Leni” doesn’t make clear why it’s so urgent that the two versions of Leni collaborate on a film about her life now. Characters seem to know different amounts of information at different times, as a matter of playwriting convenience, and the rules of their space shift constantly, frustratingly: Are they actually filming something? If so, the actors perform as if their set is a giant blob, never locating the few physical realities of their dreamlike world in particular places.
These flaws don’t glare, though. “Leni,” a worthy testament to its complicated subject, epitomizes what the Aurora does best.
Lily Janiak is The San Francisco Chronicle’s theater critic. Let’s talk theater: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LilyJaniak
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