[NEohioPAL] Review of "Amazons and Their Men" at con-con

[Bob Abelman via NEohioPAL]

con-con's 'Amazons' can't see the forest for the trees

 

Bob Abelman

Cleveland Jewish News

Member, International Association of Theatre Critics 

 

 

You've got to admire convergence-continuum for swinging for the fences with every production it stages.  Unfortunately, its rendering of Jordan Harrison's "Amazons and Their Men," an offbeat off-Broadway success in 2008, misses by a mile.  

 

The play offers us a fictionalized version of real-life German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, who was one of Hitler's favorite propagandists.  In 1939, she started work on her own project - the film "Penthesilea," about the myth of Achilles' battle with the Amazons - in which she cast herself as the leader of the female warriors, who falls in love with the Greek hero.  

 

The film was never completed, but "Amazons and Their Men" - a play with a message and a mischievous wit - imagines that it was and takes us on that film shoot.  

 

The intention is not to shed light on Frau Riefenstahl's innovative filmmaking techniques, although part of the quirky charm of this play is having Riefenstahl narrate camera positions and edits as film scenes are enacted on stage.  Rather, it exposes her efforts - and those of many German citizens - to narrow their focus so to shut out the encroaching evil of the Nazi regime.  

 

This play is a clever set up for caustic social commentary, for in it Riefenstahl (Lauri Hammer) hires a Jewish actor (Clint Elston) to play Achilles, a gypsy from Romania (Jack Matuszewski) to play Achilles' lover, and her sister (Jaclyn Cifranic), a lesbian, to play every extra in the film.  We not only have a microcosm of victims of the Third Reich but, as the play jumps back and forth from the fantasy world of the film to the real world, we witness the imminent intersection of the two.

 

Late in the play, for example, Riefenstahl criticizes her sister's acting performance in a death scene by pointing to the atrocities occurring outside her studio and saying "they did it better."  

 

Sadly, convergence-continuum misses the mark on these and most other poignant and comedic moments.  The play is performed without much attention to detail and is consequently flat and rather uninteresting.  

 

For more of this review, go to: http://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/features/article_20657e68-20a6-11e4-a01a-001a4bcf887a.html
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