Theatre in Review: Sontag: Reborn (Under the Radar Festival/Public Theatre)

Sontag: Reborn begins, startlingly, on a note of unintended comedy. We see a video image, in extreme close-up, of Moe Angelos, the piece's sole perfomer, as the older Susan Sontag, that mane of hair crossed by a traffic lane of white; each puff of her cigarette reverberates like a small tremor, sending waves of smoke into the atmosphere. It's an iconic image of the world-weary intellectual, famous from so many book covers.

Then Angelos appears on stage, sits down, and begins to read from Sontag's journals. "And what is it," she asks, "to be young in years and suddenly awakened to the urgency, the anguish of life?" She answers that question at length; among other things, it is "humiliation...a bowed head held between one's hands...it is 'my god, my god,' (in lower case, of course, because there is no god.)" A minute or two later, she proclaims, "Immersing myself in Gide again-what clarity and precision!"

Hilariously, these are the jottings of a 15-year-old. She's barely in high school, and a cloud of existential angst has affixed itself above her prematurely furrowed brow. And she's getting relief from reading Gide! It's enough to make you reach out and say, Oh honey, junior year is going to be really difficult.

But Sontag: Reborn, taken entirely from Sontag's journals, is so gripping because it so lucidly portrays a young woman whose heart and soul are racing to keep up with her rampaging intellect. At a time when her contemporaries were fixated on the details of prom night, Sontag was bearding Thomas Mann in his den, getting tidbits about the writing of The Magic Mountain from the master himself. (In an especially revealing passage, she carefully palms a lit Fatima cigarette smoked in Mann's presence, saving it as a souvenir of their encounter.)

If the young Sontag is thoroughly at ease in the worlds of letters and philosophy, everyday life leaves her lumbered. "I never realized it was possible to live through one's body," she says, having arrived at Berkeley, where she discovers her love of women (something she never managed to integrate into her public persona). Possibly the most touching passage in Sontag: Reborn recounts a night on the town in San Francisco with H., an early girlfriend. Sontag's description of a gay bar -- the female couples, the drag queens and transsexuals, the jazz band -- is rendered in detail with a faintly patronizing detachment, as if she is Margaret Mead, fresh off the boat and greeting her Samoans. She soon rhapsodizes about sex with H., announcing that she wants to sleep with many people. Yet, within the year, she is married to Philip Rieff, a much older professor at the University of Chicago, ten days after meeting him. The marriage quickly falls apart -- that's putting it mildly -- and next she is traipsing through London and Paris, reunited with H. in a tempestuous romance that sounds like something out of an Ann Bannon pulp romance. This is followed by an even more operatic fling with the playwright Maria Irene Fornes -- Sontag tells Fornes she loves her; the latter replies, "What's that got to do with anything?" -- leading to more scenes, more depressions, more breakups and reunions. (Perusing H.'s diary, Sontag is horrified to learn that she is only a so-so lover, good enough in a pinch; unbelievably, it happens all over again with Fornes. I assume she learned to leave her girlfriends' notebooks alone.)

Most solo shows about the famous have all the thrill of a Wikipedia listing, but Sontag: Reborn is filled with the implicit drama of a young woman of astounding intellectual gifts and little emotional maturity struggling to get by in a world loaded with tough customers. Her ambition is stunning; her ability to read others, not so much. Certain asinine remarks - in New York, she is charmed by "the shared comedy of being Jewish" - further betray just how far she had yet to go.

Angelos sits at a table, reading passages from the journals with admirable eloquence; on a screen in front of her, the older Sontag puffs away, offering occasional explanatory notes and bits of criticism. (Dick Page's makeup turns the actress into a dead ringer for the older Sontag.) Behind her, another screen shows the surface of her table, on which is layered various images. At times, Angelos lies down on it, and we get an overhead view of her on screen. The video design, by Austin Switser, is thoroughly accomplished, its cascade of images suggesting the rush of ideas in Sontag's head. Joshua Higginson's set design and Laura Mroczkowski's lighting are appropriately simple, letting the video take center stage. Dan Dobson's sound design effectively blends jazz licks and arias from Der Rosenkavalier, the distinctive click of a movie projector, and many other effects.

Writing, it seems, was more than a means of self-expression for Sontag; it was a means of self-invention -- in the journals, she creates herself word by word, phrase by phrase. Under the sure hand of Marianne Weems' direction, Sontag: Reborn makes us privy to each step of her anguished, elated, and thoroughly tumultuous progress.--David Barbour