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THEATER REVIEWS; Stories About Storytellers, Soldiers, Actors and Others
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By ANITA GATES
Published: April 13, 2005
'Deco Diva'
59E59 Theater, through April 24
59 East 59th Street, Manhattan
(212)279-4200
Kara Wilson makes her entrance in ''Deco Diva'' in an emerald-green evening dress. It is 1939, and she is the Polish artist Tamara de Lempicka, living in Paris, willing to talk to an imaginary journalist as she works. In the course of the play, Ms. Wilson paints a copy of Lempicka's ''Beautiful Rafaela.'' This feels like a parlor trick but adds a bit of needed texture to this short and stylish but lightweight work.
Lempicka grew up in Poland and moved to Paris with her Russian husband. She took up painting after her daughter, Kizette, was born, and found both career satisfaction and financial success. The contrasts, textures and modern techniques of the new Art Deco style suited her. Even as a schoolgirl, she says, ''I did not like the messiness of the Impressionists.'' Her best-known work, a painting of herself in a green Bugatti, was commissioned as a German magazine cover.
Lempicka was always unorthodox in matters of love. ''I am an artist,'' she says in the show, which is adapted by Ms. Wilson from a memoir by Lempicka's daughter. Lempicka's first marriage ended after her husband fell in love with another woman. ''I don't know why,'' she says. ''I never saw the need to fall in love to enjoy a love affair.''
Ms. Wilson is immensely likable as the sort of insouciant woman who would have taken car trips with the king of Spain and whose friends might have talked about burning down the Louvre to pave the way for modern art.
Occasionally, as Lempicka remembers, Ms. Wilson breaks into song -- ''Zyczenie'' in Polish, Cole Porter's ''I've Got You Under My Skin'' -- with orchestrations by her husband, the actor Tom Conti. She ends the show with a Kurt Weill-Paul Green number (''For life is short and funny/And love must have an end''), which seems appropriate. ANITA GATES
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