Judith Chapman Lovingly Essays Vivien at Rogue Machine

 

Vivien/by Rick Foster/directed by Elina de Santos/Rogue Machine/through September 4

Fans of Vivien Leigh will not want to miss Rick Foster's Vivien starring beautiful Judith Chapman at the Rogue Machine through September 4. It's passionate, theatrical and thoroughly engaging as Chapman and Leigh connect on more than one plateau.

The resemblance, to be sure, is uncanny. The gorgeous Leigh could not be portrayed any better than by the equally stunning Miss Chapman. Chapman walks with Leigh's graceful stride and speaks ever so softly like Leigh, but it is in digging below the surface that brings most of the treasure to light. Leigh was a complex, mentally-ill woman - a manic depressive, a most likely candidate for schizophrenia - who appeared gracious, lady-like on the outside, but had an in-depth fractured power that frequently went spiraling out of control, especially toward the end of her life in the 60s. And is it any wonder after seven long years of electric shock therapy? She was known to say and do things to loved ones that she couldn't remember saying or doing. So sad!

Foster structures the play in the form of a dream. At the top Leigh enters an empty theatre in London to read the role of Agnes in Albee's A Delicate Balance, a part that she is not eager to play. No one is there, and so she begins a fantasy exchange of recollections from her life for an audience in a theatre where she truly comes vibrantly alive. In order to play a role, you must love the character, Larry Olivier taught her, and her greatest regret was that she grew too old to put a Shakesperean character like Juliet or Cleopatra on film. She lived life to the fullest through her roles like Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind and Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire. There are glimpses of the joy/pain in her marriage to Olivier, friendships with Sir Winston Churchill, Katharine Hepburn - whom she refers to as her spirit of air and light - and a notorious affair with Peter Finch, as Olivier continued to cheat on her with their marriage disintegrating. Through the craziness of it all, she never really stopped loving him, and that only added to her instability. There are lines from Antigone, funny stories about Clark Gable and how difficult it was to play a love scene with him due to his bourbon breath and more serious moments like a breakdown while in the midst of filming, a torturous descent into living madness. Through it all, Foster has Leigh express an acceptance of who she is - not Scarlett, not Blanche, not Cleopatra - but Vivien Leigh, a woman who always wanted life to be as beautiful as when she was a girl, a woman who lived in extremes. At least, this is the picture he leaves us with at play's end, all of which is a dream.

Chapman is mesmerizing throughout and essays de Santos' moves around the large open stage - with elegant design by Stephanie Kerley Schwartz - sometimes with the grace of a ballerina, other times with the force and ferocity of a wind storm. She lives and breathes this role, as hers is a dexterously physical and brilliantly impassioned tour-de-force performance. Vivien is not to be missed!

 

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