Ann Noble and Leo Marks (Photo by Matt Kamimura)
Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
The Victory Theatre Center
Through August 18
RECOMMENDED
In Crevasse, playwright Tom Jacobson spins a what-might-have-happened tale around the 1938 meeting between two enigmatic public figures: Leni Riefenstahl, the brilliant German filmmaker who dedicated her talents to glorifying Hitler and the Third Reich, and Walt Disney, the creator of Mickey Mouse and, as such, a purveyor to the world of apple pie American values. Skillfully staged by director Matthew McCray at the Victory Theater, Crevasse doesn’t so much portray the historical reality of that meeting (I doubt that was the playwright’s intent) as illuminate how easily evil can invade and permeate the human spirit.
When Riefenstahl visited the States in 1938, she was searching for a distribution deal for Olympia, a documentary about the 1936 Olympics held in Berlin. The film included, among other events, the triumph of Black American Jesse Owens, who came away with four gold medals in track. Riefenstahl hoped that the less definitively political nature of Olympia — i.e., its focus on athletics — would help open doors otherwise closed to her because of her reputation as a maker of the Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will, as well as the persistent rumors that she was Hitler’s lover.
But Riefenstahl was disappointed. By the time she landed in Hollywood, the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League had already mobilized, with a full page ad in the Hollywood Reporter decrying her visit — which fell a couple of weeks after Kristallnacht — and exhorting producers to shut their doors — which they did.
That is, all except Disney, whose studio, far from the powerhouse we know it as today, was a struggling entity, partly due to the loss in revenue suffered because of the war in Europe. And Disney himself was not yet the patriarch whose grandpa visage greeted the young fans of The Mickey Mouse Club every weekday in the 1950s. Instead, he was a youngish apolitical man wholly invested in his craft. The fierce anti-communist and union-buster he became later had not yet manifest.
Finessed by McCray, this premiere production ignites around a fire-crackling performance by Ann Noble as the sexy, ambitious and utterly self-absorbed Leni, a siren none too subtle in her efforts to convince Disney (a nuanced Leo Marks) to help her lock in a deal.
Disney, for his part, is intrigued — but for him, the meeting is more about showing off his studio and its craft than forming an alliance with this sometimes embarrassingly forward visitor. Nonetheless, Riefenstahl persists, determined to overcome his resistance through a combination of her considerable allure and the promise of tremendous profits for them both.
One of the ways Jacobson instills poignancy in this story is through the inclusion of two other (historically based) characters: Ernest Jaeger. Riefenstahl’s agent (Marks), and Jaeger’s cherished wife, Lottie (Noble), a Jewish woman who is left behind in Germany when he travels, for financial reasons, with Riefenstahl to the States. Jaeger loses touch with Lotte, surmising that she’d been seized by the Nazis and presuming, given the odds, that she’d perished.
Veteran thespians Noble and Marks are both in top form, smoothly transitioning between roles (Marks also portrays Goebbels, and Noble plays an FBI agent), and transforming their appearance in a flash (costumes by Michael Mullen). For scenes in Germany and others, scenic designer Evan Bartoletti employs a drapey, silver-grey fabric as backdrop (lighting by Azra King-Abadi) a choice that suggests the characters are existing, symbolically, within a crevasse (a deep crack in a glacier, referred to several times in the script). The scenes in Disney’s studios are cleverly conjured with a series of folding flats enabling the illusion that the characters are moving from one room to another. These are embellished by Nicholas Santiago’s projection design, some decorative, some animated. John Zalewski’s sound, rumbling and ominous, profoundly underscores the historic implication of events.
At times, shoptalk between Disney and Riefenstahl seemed to me to slow the pace. But Jacobson’s themes and the drama’s overall construct are strong and sound respectively. As to the production, it’s another inspiring example of what talented theater artists working together can achieve in a small space and with a limited budget.
The Victory Theatre Center, 3326 W. Victory Blvd., Burbank. Fri.-Sat., 8 pm, Sun., 4 pm; thru Aug. 18. www.thevictorytheatrecenter.org Running time: approximately 90 minutes with no intermission.
