Moe Angelos as young Susan Sontag (and as an older Sontag on a scrim above) in the Builders Association’s “Sontag: Reborn.” (Photo: James Gibbs)
Susan Sontag, author of many books that are now classics—Against Interpretation, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Where the Stress Falls, Regarding the Pain of Others—has been gone for 10 years. But her trenchant writing, brilliant insights and fearless expressiveness have kept her very much alive, here in the present. She comes up in conversation frequently in my life, and her books are some of my favorites. Now that her journals are available—she began writing them when she was a precocious and voraciously curious 14 year old—the evolution of her mind’s development has been laid open.
It is a tempting idea to capture Sontag’s quickfire thinking in a theatrical setting, and I can think of a thousand ways it would not work. But when your team is actor and adapter Moe Angelos, director Marianne Weems and the rest of Builders Association team, that rarefied Sontagian world is recreated with a multidimensional richness that is mystifying. In Sontag: Reborn, the many textures are captured—how the mind thinks, how reality is constantly being parsed, how a writer arduously creates (and invents) a self.
“We tried to stage her mind at work, her mental process, in a small way,” says Angelos who plays Sontag both as a young woman and later in her life. Part of that mental process involves the vulnerability that was so evident in the young Sontag, a quality that really struck Angelos when she poured over Sontag’s unedited journals in the Sontag archives at UCLA. Experiencing the awkwardness and discomfort of a young brilliant woman gives a new dimension to the hard edged, combative woman that Sontag was known to be in her later life.
While there is only one actor on stage throughout, this is nothing like the genre of the one woman show. Angelos sits at a desk and begins as a teenaged Sontag. Projected nearby is a larger-than-life image of Angelos playing an older Sontag with that signatory white mane. As the young Sontag shares her insights, the older Sontag interacts and comments. (How appropriate given Sontag’s predilection to review her own early journal entires and allow her older self to annotate them.) Words appear on the screen behind Angelos as she writes, and phrases periodically unravel out towards the audience. The dreamy specter of an older self, the stacks of books that were so beloved, the agonizing struggle to make sense of the self and of life–it all comes together to open up a theatrical window into the private and evolving mind of a writer.
I have heard about Builders Association and their singular mastery of multimedia, but this is the first production by them that I have seen. Their own description is a good one: “The company uses the richness of new and old tools to extend the boundaries of theatre. Based on innovative collaborations, they blend stage performance, text, video, sound and architecture to tell stories about human experience in the 21st century.” I won’t be missing any of their future productions.
If you are in Boston, if you love words, if you are fascinated by Sontag, if you are engaged in the life of the mind, this is for you. The performance is at the Paramount Center and runs through May 18. For more information, see ArtsEmerson.