Review - Sontag: Reborn

Through clever use of multimedia, playwright/performer Moe Angelos' Sontag: Reborn offers glimpses at both the precocious enthusiasm of youth and the wry remembrances of one looking back upon those same years. ("Childhood: a terrible waste of time.") Both come in the form of novelist, essayist, literary critic and inspiration for at least one Broadway showtune, Susan Sontag.

Director Marianne Weems' cerebrally sexy production has the playwright situated behind a black scrim portraying the title character from ages 15 to 31, the year her essay "Notes on 'Camp'" propelled her into literary fame when first published in The Partisan Review. Projected onto the scrim, taking long sensual inhalations from her ever-present cigarette and sporting that trademark streak of white hair is Austin Switser's video of Angelos as a 60ish Sontag, the world-weary voice of bohemian sophistication, commenting on the texts of her long ago journals and notebooks (later published as Reborn) as her giddily ambitious and wide-eyed counterpart is writing them.

On the upstage wall of Joshua Higgason's set we see a projection of the writing desk, piled with books by the likes of Leo Tolstoy and Andre Gide, where the live-action heroine jots down her observations; many loaded with regret ("Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings.") and many others loaded with flippant party girl flair. ("Met H at the Café Flore afterwards, and had 5 or so whiskeys at the Club St. Germain and the Tabou. Not stupefied drunk, but enough to get with the so-so jazz we were hearing at the St. Germain, and with the superb sex we had near dawn, in bed.")

Crammed into those years are enough accomplishments and events to cover at least two seasons of an HBO series. Recognizing her bisexuality at 15 (the aforementioned "H" was her first female lover), she followed her 8-year marriage, which began when she was 17, with a long-term relationship with María Irene Fornés, all the while raising a son and earning numerous academic degrees before her first novel, The Benefactor, was ripped apart by the New York Times.

While Sontag: Reborn doesn't offer a linear narrative, the numerous quotes and quips add up to an entertaining portrait of a young women balancing her sexual and intellectual awakenings, juxtaposed against the vision of what she will eventually become. Performing behind the scrim limits the opportunity for the live Angelos to connect with the audience, so she's often upstaged by her own video image, but it's Sontag's words that, appropriately, dominate the evening, making the piece a terrific date night choice for the literary nerd set.

Photo of Moe Angelos by Joan Marcus.

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