Leni Riefenstahl remains one of the 20th century’s most controversial and contradictory artists. Known for the creation of innovative filmmaking techniques, the German director created two films in the 1930s funded by The Third Reich. How can anyone watch her Triumph of the Will (1935) and not see a willing and fervent supporter of Nazism? But throughout her life (she died in 2003 at the age of 101), she repeatedly claimed ignorance of the horrors enacted by the Nazi regime.
James Clements’ new play Beauty Freak thrusts its audience into Riefenstahl´s life behind the camera, to step into her mind as an attempt to examine these conflicting questions. Inside the intimate cell theatre, the audience sits on two sides, making us into a jury examining historical evidence while reminding us to see our own degrees of complicity. While we may have the benefit of looking back on history, how clearly are we seeing our own time, and the choices we are making within it?
Director Danilo Gambini has assembled an excellent ensemble of talented actors here. The play is set mostly in Germany during the filming of her documentary about the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, a pivotal moment in Riefenstahl´s career, as well as a time of consolidating power in Nazi Germany. She wears many faces throughout this play, a theme Gambini gestures to throughout using a number of clever theatrical strategies. In the opening image, for example, Leni (a brilliant Baize Buzan) stands on top of a small table and turns clockwise like a doll, while the rest of the cast (all men) rotate in the opposite direction around her. The filmmaker fancies herself a proto-feminist, a woman willing to do anything male-dominated world. When she and Goebbels (a wicked Peter Coleman) begin their scene they are speaking German– before smoothly switching over to English– discussing the budget for Olympia. Some of her statements and justifications, both in this scene and later on in Beauty Freak, make sense–but to a point. We could applaud Leni´s cunning as a businesswoman and her resourcefulness as a filmmaker, but only if we’re willing to ignore the context. After all, Goebbels is not merely a financial backer for her film, despite Riefenstahl´s attempts to convince us otherwise.
Perception, performance, perspective: Spending time with Riefenstahl requires cognitive dissonance. It’s like trying to see clearly through a distorted glass. Can anyone this talented and intelligent also be this blind to the politics her work is helping to endorse? Does she not see what is happening all around her? Yet many of Riefenstahl’s most prominent contemporaries–Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Walt Disney (who makes a cameo in Beauty Freak, performed by the playwright)– also expressed admiration for Hitler´s “strong leadership” in addressing Germany’s social and economic troubles in the years following The Great War. Despite attempts to display herself as an apolitical artist, a person whose allegiance lay only to esthetics, she benefitted directly and handsomely from the fascist regime of her time. While she may be a genius in her use of the camera, Riefenstahl´s cinematic art indisputably served a singular purpose: to craft a portrait of power that is both beautiful and alluring. The fact that her films make fascism seem so gorgeous is what makes them so sinister.
Beauty Freak is a sharp and engaging historical drama and, without ever talking down to its audience, draws parallels to America’s current slide into authoritarianism. Rather than attempt to reform or justify her legacy, Clements places us in the middle of the questions. This is a play chronicling how otherwise reasonable individuals–and perhaps most especially the brilliant and most talented ones–can delude themselves into thinking they are above the world being on fire.
Clements´ script tracks Leni’s denial, until the facts of Nazism become irrefutable. We see her denial first begin to crack when asked to write a letter to Hitler asking for clemency for her friend Max (Luca Fontaine), arrested and beaten for homosexuality. Leni is hesitant, as such a missive could jeopardize her own artistic prospects. Gambini stages the scene as if Leni is dictating the letter to Max himself, who responds silently to each sentence as he takes down the dictation. At the scene’s end, Leni tears up the letter, causing Max to collapse into the floor.
On a tour to America to promote Olympia, Leni dines with German Ambassador Dieckhoff (an exceptional Slate Holmgren), and confronts the truth of what is actually happening in their homeland. Holmgren infuses Dieckhoff’s monologue with malevolent charm, and Clements´ text echoes much of the rhetoric found today in MAGA: a cocktail blending patriotism with racial animus, and a justification of hatred and violence along the path of re-establishing Germany’s “greatness.” Throughout, the two share a piece of cake, a symbol which will return towards the end of the play to visceral effect.
Ultimately, Beauty Freak argues that all of us–every single one of us–is somehow complicit. All of us bear some responsibility for the atrocities then and now. By the final scenes, we have watched Leni go “all in” as an extension of the Nazi regime for reasons that are just as much a calculation on her artistic career as it is an ideological alignment. Crafted with intelligence and a heightened sense of theatricality, Beauty Freak is a powerful warning for our times.
Photo by Alexia Haick
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