THEATER - Anais Nin: One of her Lives

As is too often the case, fact is rarely as fanciful as fantasy. Most of playwright/director Wendy Beckett’s drama Anaïs Nin: One of her Lives is imagined or extrapolated from Nin’s erotic diaries, Anaïs’s character is filled with understanding, not passion, and seems unable to live off the page. One of her Lives is not a bad play, but it is an awkward one, a series of loose, drifting encounters in 1930s Paris between Nin and the far-more interesting Henry and June Miller. The presentation of this material isn’t original: the 1990 film Henry & June used similar details, and Beckett doesn’t bring enough theatricality or insight to Nin to justify the work on that level. Where it shines is as a literary passion play, climaxing in a slow, sexy seduction between Henry and Anaïs's recitations from their journals. But words only get you so far . . .

In this case, Beckett paints herself into a corner with the sub-plot she’s erected (perhaps to distinguish this work from other adaptations). Nin’s abortive sessions with the psychologist Dr. Rank (not the Chekhovian one) abound in cryptic and meaningless riddles and the dreamlike encounters between Anaïs and her parents remain dreamy and without substance. Though we learn that one sequence beween Anaïs and her long-gone father is real, there’s nothing to draw from the scene itself, which is the real problem with the play itself: a lack of resolution.

Why focus on Anaïs Nin? She may be an erotic woman in her diaries (and certainly has a fully encompassing sexual history), but the character that Beckett constructs is a little girl prone to giggling uncontrollably or weeping tragically, without any real sense of self or being. Alysia Reiner and David Bishins, who excellently portray the Millers, upstage her without even saying a word. This fits in June’s case, as she’s an explosive personality who sucks in and destroys the people around her, but for Henry, presented here as a gruff yet gentle skirt-chaser, their physical relationship never smolders, only their words.

Angela Christian, who plays Anaïs, is cheated by a flimsy and quieting French accent that minimizes her at every turn. She has a great command of her body (which probably comes from her experience in musical theater), but nowhere to take it—hence all the spurts of pacing back and forth. There’s drama at the heart of this love triangle, but Beckett’s play doesn’t capture it: the whole construct, from the calligraphic walls to the book-stacked set, is too chaste and Anaïs Nin sorely needs of some vulgarity.