Theater Online - New York Theater Reviews

In the late 1960's, the self-obsessed, hilariously narcissistic diaries of Anaïs Nin reached a certain popularity, mainly because of their then vanguard erotic content. Nin brooked no boundaries in her pursuit of pleasure and self-knowledge: she even had an affair with her own father. This was someone who couldn't stop writing about herself and analyzing her own psyche in flowery language—she's very easy to parody, but there's really no point in doing so because she does such a good job of it herself. Nin expounded endlessly on her roles as writer, artist, beauty, keeper of men and "fragile" earth mother. She writes obsessively about the pains of creating art without ever creating any herself, an exhausting feat only matched by her lover and soul mate, Henry Miller, a similarly tedious writer who boasted about his sexual encounters in a "let it all hang out," proto-Beat fashion. These two failed the cardinal duty of a writer: selectivity. Even in Nin's best writing, her character portrait of Miller's wife June, she pursues insight into the woman's motives so relentlessly and indiscriminately that even her flashes of illumination begin to cancel each other out.

Wendy Beckett's play about Nin, called "One of Her Lives," takes everything Nin wrote at face value. It's staged on a set that is as pretty and non-functional as Nin's writing, with the actors moving aimlessly around stacks of books and black deco figures. Angela Christian's Anaïs is physically right for the part (though her blond hair is a distraction), but she quotes even Nin's most pretentious writing with self-conscious seriousness. David Bishins' Miller comes equipped with a broad, accurate accent and appropriate gusto, but Beckett has effectively neutered him in long, aimless scenes with Nin where they roll around coyly and read their work aloud. Beckett directed the play herself, and she seems to have no idea how to create any dramatic tension between Nin, Miller and his wife June (Alysia Reiner)—even when they fight, there seems to be nothing at stake. Reiner is outstanding: frisky, bold and very sexual. When her June leaves for New York the play collapses and begins to seem endless. As Nin's father and her psychiatrist, Rocco Sisto is stuck with several nebulous scenes that go nowhere. There might be a good play to be written about Nin, but it would need to be funnier, tighter, and more cognizant of who she was rather than what she said she was. Christopher Durang made her a demented figure of fun in his parodic "The Idiots Karamazov," and that play will most likely stand as her most memorable theatrical portrait.