Zelda Fitzgerald from the Inside
Leslie Vicary as “The Last Flapper”
LESLIE VICARY gave a daunting, daring portrayal in “The Last Flapper,” which unfortunately ran for only one weekend at the South of Broadway Theatre on Montague Avenue.
The one-woman play by William Luce (here directed by Mark Gorman) is taken fairly directly from the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, who was diagnosed as schizophrenic near the age of 30. Thereafter she lived in and out of—mostly in—mental institutions, which is where the audience finds her the day before she dies in a fire, aged 48.
Leslie’s performance was daunting because she was on stage alone (never an easy task for actor or director) and because she had to carry 90 minutes of dramatic action—which spans Zelda’s entire life—by means of dialogue alone. Her only props were a desk, a chair, and a phone.
At the same time, Leslie’s performance was daring because she had to honestly plum and unabashedly reveal her own depths in order to convey the conflicted emotions and multiple personalities of this character. Given the range of raw emotions that Leslie called forth, it was clear that she could not just “do what you did in rehearsal.” The material is too real for that.
I came away thinking, how do you navigate a script that by design has to be thoroughly scattered? How do you convincingly “act” mentally disturbed and—equally convincingly—summon divine madness on stage? How, in addition to portraying all of this in one character (and at different ages of that character), do you manage to also squeeze in her father, mother, daughter, and psychiatrist—to name just a few?
Even though Zelda was just a character on stage, it was unsettling and mentally exhausting to watch a schizophrenic traverse the territories—the morass—of her own mind. It was also illuminating to see that, even though her mind was distinctly haphazard compared to a “normal” mind, it did not really contain any abnormal thoughts. What made them abnormal was their arrangement. And distorted as some of them may have been, they were often accompanied by a disarmingly candid perspicacity.
For example: “There’s gotta be a streak of sanity in me somewhere.” “Psychiatry is worse than witchcraft; it gives one the illusion of hope.” “We (she and her husband) thought happiness would be something more… dramatic.” “There’s never been a way to hold onto summer.” And my personal favorite: “Mind you: I’m not monogamous in theory; only in practice.”
Zelda’s extraordinary penetration and clarity of thought also shone through in this sequence of lines: “Can you tell me why, when our bodies ought to bring relief from our tortured minds, they fail and collapse? And why, when we’re tormented in our bodies, does our soul desert us as a refuge? Why do we spend years using up our bodies to nurture our minds with experience, only to have our minds turn to our exhausted bodies for solace?”
Many have admired this play as a celebration of Zelda’s artistic talents which lay hidden in the shadow of her famous husband, who forbid her to publish only to then use her writings as source material in his own. The play also acknowledges Zelda’s fierce independence in the early 1900s when “flappers” were being so unconventionally bold as to “wear short skirts, bob their hair, listen to jazz, wear excessive makeup, drink, treat sex casually, drive cars, and otherwise flaunt their disdain for acceptable behavior.” (Wikipedia)
In fact, Zelda fit this mold so well that, contrary to the play’s title, her husband called her “the first American flapper,” adding that he “cherished her most extravagant hallucinations.”
It is those “extravagant hallucinations” that stood out in this portrayal—a portrayal that led us beyond Zelda’s artistic talent and dramatic (often humorous) flouting of social norms. This was a journey into, and a careful dissection of, the inner world of a woman whose outer life held so much promise, only to be sabotaged by excessive self-preoccupation, paranoia, and a seemingly bipolar nature.
To sit there and watch her implode was not pleasant—which demonstrated the pith and power of this performance.
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