Review: Union Arts Center’s Riveting Portrait Of Frida Kahlo Is A Solo Triumph

Frida…a self portrait
6/6-28/26
Union Arts Center, www.unionartsccenter.org

Solo artists are a special breed, I think. They are alone on stage the entire time, they must draw the audience toward themselves, and bravely expose their very being at every moment. Such is Vanessa Severo, who wrote and performs Frida, as in Frida Kahlo, the now famous, but ignored and discounted Mexican painter.

When Severo runs onto the stage to introduce her play, she immediately beguiles the audience with huge energy and enthusiasm, and proceeds to lead us into why she’s telling us this story and what it means to her. In that process, she also tells us without words that we can relax now, she knows what she’s doing and she’s ready for us.
As herself, she describes what drew her to the writings of and then the story of Frida Kahlo, and suddenly, there Frida is! Frida is being interviewed for a publicity piece focused on the house she lives in for an architectural magazine. Yet, she isn’t interested in talking about the house she grew up in.

We see her bedridden, in such terrible pain from multiple physical tragedies that she is constantly in need of morphine. But maybe because she is so isolated, she decides to tell stories to the interviewers with a combination of disdain, rage, coquettishness, and a sort of triumph that she’s still alive through it all.

The inventive staging consists of laundry hung on lines, full of every costume need, as she uses and then discards them after they are no longer needed for the story. And the story is not just about Frida; it’s the intersection of the some of the similar physical tragedies that Severo faced in her own life. In fact, Severo herself is a triumph of her own will to produce art.

Severo infuses this work with sections of movement that exquisitely tell the story without words. Often, I sometimes feel lost when a performer uses that kind of technique, because often they know what they’re telling but they’ve lost me. Not here. She is as much a dancing storyteller as an oral one. In one very poignant segment, she dances the heartbreaking story of Frida’s multiple miscarriages.

One choice she has made is to not focus on any of Frida’s paintings. A few minutes of projection photos or recreations could go a long way to emphasize Kahlo’s talents, and it’s hard to know why none were included. It’s one of the few “misses” in the choices made. But overall, this is a journey and a story well worth going to. Let Severo beguile you, too.

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