Modotti, now playing in a limited run at the Acorn Theater on Theatre Row/West 42nd Street, tells the story of the Italian photographer/actress who became a revolutionary in Mexico and Edward Weston’s lover.
True, playwright Wendy Beckett doesn’t have the rich material about art that John Logan had with Mark Rothko for Red. (I was not one of the critics who found his talk about art unbearably pretentious; Red won the Tony award for best play on Sunday night.)
But Beckett had a far more action-packed life with Modotti; she had sex, violence, revolution, oppression, intrigue. Logan had Rothko’s intellectual fervor, true, but Beckett also had Modotti’s Italian origins and her love of life, politics, and adventure.
Somehow all that has worked to Modotti‘s disadvantage rather than its advantage.
Because Modotti is far from being a household name, the play begins, at a small party among friends, with a lot of exposition. Unfortunately, it seems both unnatural and too-drawn-out. There’s a lot of rhetoric, and there’s some interesting dialogue. But when Modotti explains to a potential collector how she works, it seems like an afterthought, unimportant to the play. When she says she wants to use photography in the service of the revolution (her Workers Parade, 1926, is above), it seems pie-in-the-sky and irrelevant: Modotti’s real actions as a member of the communist party in Mexico were far more critical in her life. Weston, bewitched by her, is nonetheless overwhelmed by her talk of politics, tired of it too, and so is the audience.
Disparaging “art as a political tool,” he’s more interested in photography as art — at one point as abstraction.
Surprisingly, to me, Weston comes off as not only weak but also unlikable. (I hope I forget that by the time I see another of his wonderful photographs.) Diego Rivera, meanwhile, comes off as shallow, a sell-out, and not a very engaging one at that.
So, as far as art goes, Modotti doesn’t cut it. As a drama, I wish Beckett had focused on one or two incidents in her life, rather than trying to write a bioplay.