Amazons and Their Men

SHE’S SMOKIN’ Wisocky has a contemplative cigar.

Photograph: Frank Cwiklik

Ken Rus Schmoll’s occasionally thrilling production of Jordan Harrison’s lopsided comedy, Amazons and Their Men, starts out promisingly perky but winds up a little flat. Still, as any self-respecting Amazon will tell you, half a bosom—or half a clever play—is better than none. These ancient fighting maidens hacked off one of their breasts so they could draw their bows more tightly; I wouldn’t have minded some strategic slicing in Harrison’s text. But the parts that do work—hilarious, plummy renditions of fake expressionist 1930s Greco-melodrama—are an absolute teat.

A glamazon film director (Rebecca Wisocky), whose fictional credits hew closely to Leni Riefenstahl’s, is shooting her masterpiece. It will tell the story of warrior-queen Penthesilea…or it will if the Nazi minister of culture forks over a plane, if her lead (a conscripted Jewish Achilles) stops whining and if her scene-stealing extra (Heidi Schreck) would just die more quietly.

Schmoll’s inspired ripped-from-the-sprockets filmic style (designer Sue Rees provides the dollies) keeps us waiting for some surprising deleted scene—selective editing, after all, is how documentarians lie. But sadly, the sharp fable about artistic responsibility crossfades into bathos. Wisocky, though, rises above. Her profile belongs on a coin; her delivery is part Norma Desmond, part Kathakali warrior. She hangs onto her icy hauteur even as the play starts to warm and ooze around her. If only Harrison had likewise hung onto his moral ambiguity, he would have followed his heroine into a triumph of the chill.

—Helen Shaw