Kahlo craze continues with Vanessa Severo's one-woman "Frida" at STC

Vanessa Severo as Frida Kahlo (The Broken Column) in Frida...A Self Portrait. Photo: Michael Brosilow

Frida Kahlo, after living most of her life in the shadow of Diego Rivera, has become a marketing force. Especially since the turn of the century, when Salma Hayek starred in a 2002 movie about the Mexican artist, the arts world has continued to cash in on Kahlo's viral power. Her popularity as a popular icon of feminism even threatens to crowd out the striking originality of her paintings. The latest work to reimagine Kahlo comes in play form, a one-woman show written and acted by Vanessa Severo, playing now at Shakespeare Theatre Company's Klein Theatre, seen last Tuesday.

My favorite Frida Kahlo publicity stunt was the unibrow that museums were selling at gift shops and encouraging people to wear to get a discount at their Kahlo retrospectives. True to the Kahlo craze, women attending the show last Tuesday dressed à la Frida: colorful dresses, flowers in their hair, albeit with no unibrows in sight. I regretted not wearing a dead hummingbird on a thorn branch around my neck.

Appropriately, the genesis of the play lies in Severo's visit to Casa Azul, Kahlo's home in Mexico City. Severo's monologue, which flips back and forth between Kahlo's voice and the author's, is mostly presented as an imagined conversation the artist has, in her final days, with an American architecture critic visiting her at the house. She recounts the basic outline of Kahlo's life: the childhood bout of polio, the devastating bus accident when she was 18, the tumultous marriage to (and divorce from) Rivera. Although the script seems biographical, details are massaged, like Kahlo's financial dependence on the wealthy Rivera (her physical ailments meant she could not earn a living) and her membership in the Mexican Communist Party.

Severo's performance is often self-indulgent and emotive: there is a lot of screaming. The play makes some moving detours into Severo's life, mostly relating to the congenital condition that caused one of her hands to be not fully formed. This part of the play is remarkably moving, more than the take on Kahlo's life. Joanie Schultz's production adds a touching element, with clotheslines of suspended clothing for a set. Often Severo stands within one of these pieces, as if she is lying in her bed. At other times, a large, light-colored suit stands in for Rivera. The most remarkable visual moment in the play involved this suit: Severo stood weeping in front of it, overflowing with grief from her miscarriages with Rivera, while her arm within one of the suit's arms seemed to move independently as if Rivera were caressing her face and comforting her.

Frida...A Self Portrait runs through November 8. shakespearetheatre.org