Once upon a time, there was a boy who wrote poetry and a girl who painted pictures, both of whom pursued their occupations with an unswerving passion that eventually forged a bond of fellowship between them. Instead of heeding Shakespeare’s advice about admitting impediments to the marriage of true minds, however, they foolishly wedded others—the boy walked the aisle with the girl’s best friend, and the girl did the same with an older artist who saw in her a gifted pupil. But their primary loyalties—first, to their talent, and second, to each other—remained constant, despite the discomfort this dynamic inspired in their legal partners.
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Playwright: Ken Prestininzi. At: Trap Door Theatre, 1655 W. Cortland. Phone: 773-384-0494; $20. Runs through: June 21
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This story, in itself, would comprise a quaint little romance—perhaps authored by Mr. D.H. Lawrence, or Mr. E.M. Forster—complete with yearning lovers chasing an elusive happiness through the bohemian enclaves of belle-époque Paris and Berlin. Indeed, the opening scene of this Trap Door production, in which we see young ladies in white summer dresses romping on the lawn with their puppyish boy-buddy, so calls to mind Lawrence’s Women In Love, et al. that we can almost forget that the boy and girl are Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker, and their spouses, Clara Westhoff and Otto Modersohn—a quartet that, taken together, would rank among the foremost 20th-century figures in European art and literature.
Ken Prestininzi’s biodrama, drawn from his subjects’ extensive correspondence in an era when intimacy was expressed solely in the written word, speculates on the private lives of celebrities with a solemn dignity bespeaking the project’s sponsorship by the Goethe-Institut. If Modersohn-Becker’s expressionistic iconography shocked her peers, as her unconventional marital arrangement did strangers (she marvels that everyone Paris addresses her as ‘Miss,’ despite her wedding ring), the physical evidence we see onstage never exceeds the quasi-filial squabbles and affections characteristic of commune dwellers. And if the women are depicted as muscular and strong-willed, and the men as neurasthenic and passive—well, we can make what we wish of it.
The efficiency of Prestininzi’s expository progress and precision of his dialogue gives the impression of a prototype for a BBC teleplay, stopping but temporarily on the live stage. Under Kate Hendrickson’s direction, however, a capable cast led by Betsy Zajko as the exuberant—at times, bordering on manic—Paula and John Kahara as the withdrawn Rainer acquit themselves with sufficient gemütlichkeit to render our history lesson a pleasant, if unchallenging, experience.