Resurrecting
Isadora

>> Imago brings Isadora Duncan and her
fellow dead celebrities back to life

DEADLY DANCER: Leni Parker as Duncan

by AMY BARRATT

If you’re like me, the two things you know about Isadora Duncan are that she was a dancer who wore a lot of flamboyant scarves, and that one such garment was the cause of her death by strangulation while out driving.

Greg Kramer knew a little bit more than that when he was asked to write a play about the so-called “mother of modern dance” for Imago Theatre.

“I’d seen the Ken Russell film, I’d seen the Vanessa Redgrave film. I was aware that Isadora was on the periphery of the ‘charmed circle’ with Gertrude Stein and that group.”

The idea of an Isadora play has been kicking around Imago ever since Clare Schapiro took that company over in 2000, and for many years before that as a pet project of Schapiro and dancer Margie Gillis who, with her trademark bare feet and long flowing hair, has often been compared to Isadora.

“There was an image that Margie gave me of Isadora dropping her scarf saying, ‘I won’t be needing this anymore,’” says Kramer. “That gave me the idea to think of this as a story from beyond the grave. And the discovery that she was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris was a great inspiration.”

Père Lachaise is probably best known on this side of the water as Jim Morrison’s final resting place, but there are several centuries’ worth of famous people buried there, from Molière to Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, and Sarah Bernhardt. Several of them appear in Isadora: Fabulist!

Set in the catacombs beneath the cemetery, Kramer’s play has the famous residents of the cemetery re-enacting key moments from Isadora’s life. No mere biopic, Isadora: Fabulist! is also meant as a comment on today’s celebrity culture. Multi-talented Kramer (he is an actor and director as well as a playwright) is appalled at the youth of today who see “fame” as a realistic career goal. This generation is represented in the play by a young woman who stumbles upon the action in the catacombs and is roped into service as Isadora’s maid.

Many of the actors and designers have been attached to the project through several workshopping stages, and it’s one of the strongest companies you’ll see this season or any other. Sarah Stanley directs Leni Parker as Isadora; the supporting cast includes two other stalwarts of the theatre scene, Diana Fajrajsl and Chip Chuipka, and three members of the “new guard”: Andrew Shaver, Patrick Costello and Patricia Summersett.

Because of limited funding, this short run is not the “full” production they would have liked. “Still,” Kramer says, “it represents a next step from the workshops.”

Both he and Schapiro hope the production will have a life beyond this short run, but the playwright, for now, is “chuffed” to see the work finally performed for an audience.

Isadora: Fabulist! at Studio du Monument-National, tonight,
Nov. 8–Saturday, Nov. 10, 8:30 p.m., matinees today
at 12:30 p.m., and Saturday at 2 p.m. (514) 871-2224