Playwright: Timberlake Wertenbaker. At: 20% Theatre Company at the Apollo Studio, 2540 N. Lincoln. Phone: 773-935-6100; $20. Runs through: March 28
Attempts to package Isabelle Eberhardt as a proto-feminist martyr have usually met with failure. The journals of the Swiss wayfarer who roamed the Algerian desert under the alias of Si Mahmoud, a Tunisian student of Eastern theology, reveal no manifesto for improving the lot of women as a community. Indeed, Eberhardt's adventures appear to have been essayed solely in pursuit of self-discovery, with her place in a contradictory universe still eluding her upon her death in a flash flood at the untimely age of 27.
Timberlake Wertenbaker's play is neither straightforward biodrama nor gynecentric hagiography, its structure chiefly providing a context for her subject's activities during the years from 1897 to 1904: a near-itinerant family comprised of a politically-radical alcoholic Russian father, passive German mother, upwardly-mobile sister, and a beloved brother with whom Eberhardt shared an extensive, if haphazard, education, along with an intense quasi-incestuous camaraderie. A French colonialist government whose xenophobia barely conceals uncertainty over its future among increasingly hostile indigenous tribes—tensions exacerbated by the eccentric Eberhardt's notoriety. An assortment of cross-dressing female socialites in fashionable Paris—music-hall "trouser acts," remittance-funded aristocrats, lesbian literati and thrill-seeking dilettantes—whose "liberated" company Eberhardt finds no less strictly regimented.
Wertenbaker's portrait of Eberhardt confronts us with a scruffy ganymede who curses, spits, smokes kif and engages in promiscuous man-boy sex ( "No Europeans up my arse!" ) , making a Legion officer's sexual advances offensive, but hardly unexpected. The 20% Theatre Company's focus is gender issues, however, its name deriving from statistics reflecting still-existing inequities in the field of American arts. Under Elizabeth Schwan-Rosenwald's direction, the five women who play all the characters, male and female, retain their own voices and mannerisms, drawing our attention to their text's intellectual dimensions. And if their efforts occasionally take on the twee ambience of a girls' club pageant, the ensemble nevertheless acquits itself with poise and industry ( especially Jodi Wonio Kingsley as a vaudeville warbler of Kiplingesque period ditties, who turns quickly femme when faced with a parlorful of Sapphites ) .
The popularity of New Anatomies can be partly attributed to its opportunities for young actresses, but the enigma of Eberhardt herself is what continues to intrigue us. Whether she was a tourist on a counterculture spree, or a lonely pilgrim searching for sanctuary, she remains her own person, first and last, and her journey through this temporal world forever unfulfilled.
