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 Entertainment | January 2007 
Finding Beauty in Her Pain
 Suzanne Ma - The Ottawa Citizen
| | Frida Kahlo in her studio, in front of "The Two Fridas" painting. (Nickolas Muray) |
Two nights before she agreed to revive her role as Mexican artist Frida Kahlo in the critically acclaimed one-woman play Frida K., Allegra Fulton had a premonition.
"Quite mysteriously, I dreamed I was inside the play in the wheelchair, moving the props around, saying the lines," Fulton recalled.
When the dream returned the following night, Fulton wasn't sure what it all meant -- until the next day, when she received a call from friend and director Peter Hinton asking if she would once again take the stage as the flamboyant painter, iconoclast and revolutionary. It had been almost 10 years since her final performance in New York City.
"I thought I would never do this play again. I put a kibosh on it," said Fulton, whose performance won her the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best Actress. "I was ready to discover other women that hadn't been written about, to trumpet them. Had he phoned me four months before I would have said 'no.' But it just felt like, 'Yes, yes, it's absolutely meant to be.'"
Frida K. was first staged at the 1994 Toronto Fringe Festival. It had successful runs across Canada, including Ottawa, and went on to be performed in Mexico City, Chicago and New York. The award-winning play has been translated into Czech and Spanish and was performed in Madrid and Prague. Ten years later, Hinton and Fulton are bringing it back to Ottawa for a series of performances at the National Arts Centre.
Fulton's mother, playwright Gloria Montero, wrote the play especially for her daughter. It gives a glimpse into the extraordinary life of the fiery and passionate artist on the day of her first and only Mexican exhibition, shortly before her death.
"She's trying to bolster herself and get herself out the door, during the course of which she begins to take stock of her life, her paintings, her actions," Fulton explained. "It's a drama with great humour. It's about superseding mounting obstacles ... and it serves as a great reminder that we have a lot more strength and resilience as human beings than we think."
"It's about someone who has been dealt the worst hand anyone could be dealt, and comes out of it a survivor and on top," added Hinton, artistic director of English theatre at the NAC.
Kahlo was born in 1907 in Coyoacan, just outside Mexico City. As a child she suffered through polio and at 15, a freak road accident left her with a broken spine, collarbone, ribs and pelvis, in addition to 11 fractures in her right leg, a crushed and dislocated right foot and a dislocated shoulder. An iron handrail had also impaled Kahlo's abdomen, piercing her uterus and leaving her unable to bear children. Kahlo eventually was able to walk again, but was plagued by relapses of debilitating pain for the rest of her life.
After her accident, she began to paint. Many of her paintings were searing self-portraits combining French-style surrealism with the vibrant colours and themes of Mexican folk art.
She boldly portrayed herself as she actually looked -- with a thick unibrow and a slight moustache -- and depicted herself in her paintings with a broken column in place of a spine, or in the midst of a miscarriage. Kahlo sent some of her work to the famous muralist Diego Rivera, who encouraged her to continue. The pair eventually married and lived in a bohemian world of artists and Marxists in the post-revolutionary Mexico of the 1930s. They had a tumultuous relationship in which both had numerous affairs.
Hinton said 2007, the centenary of Kahlo's birth, is a good year to revive the play.
"She's such an incredible artist whose life and work is worth celebrating," he said. "She's someone who endured an incredible amount of hardship and pain and yet was able to transform that into beauty in her life ... in her paintings that continue to inspire and touch people around the world."
For Fulton, performing the same role 10 years later has given her the chance to grow and mature both as an actor and a woman.
"I have so much more experience in all matters; in emotional, physical and spiritual experience. That all suddenly lends itself to an understanding of her journey," Fulton said.
Since her last performance in New York City in 1997, Fulton has been busy with film and television projects in the U.S. and Canada. She and her husband (actor Shawn Doyle) had a son, Rhys, who is now seven years old.
Fulton is now the same age that Frida would have been at the time the play takes place.
"It was a life long dream of Frida's to have a child," Hinton said. "Now that Allegra is a mother, I think that brings a deeper resonance to the value of that in the play."
A bigger budget this time around has also led to some changes.
"Before, where things would be accomplished with light and sound, we now have a scenic representation. We can realize some of (Kahlo's) paintings on stage," said Hinton, who described new sets that place Fulton "inside" pieces of Kahlo's artwork.
A growing fascination with Kahlo's life has also catapulted her work into the mainstream. In 2002, Miramax released the movie Frida, with Salma Hayek in the title role.
In 2006, the 1943 Kahlo self-portrait Roots sold for $5.62 million at an auction; the small oil painting depicts the Mexican artist as an earth goddess, with sinuous vines spilling from her stomach.
"I feel like Frida has moved into a different place. Her popularity doesn't feel like a cult following so much," Fulton said.
"She's now in the pantheon (of artists). In the last few years, she has finally really gained her rightful place." |
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