‘Frida … A Self Portrait’ paints a moving picture

“Frida … A Self Portrait” is unlike any of the previous stage or screen works examining the Mexican artist’s life and painting.

Written and performed by Vanessa Severo, the one-woman play focuses on disability — both that of Frida Kahlo and, in several asides, the actor’s as well.

The show runs through June 25 at Pittsburgh Public Theater’s O’Reilly Theater.

Afflicted with polio as a child, which affected the use of her right leg, and bearing physical injuries after being hit by a bus at 18, the artist spent most of her life plagued by pain and medical problems.

Kahlo’s life is portrayed in vignettes through a fictionalized interview between the artist and a writer for an architectural magazine, sent to document her ancestral home.

Throughout the production, Kahlo’s anguish — physical and mental — are presented through the dialogue and the contortions of Brazilian-born Severo. The actor’s movements are tightly choreographed, at times seemingly difficult to perform and make great use of the minimal staging — just three clotheslines with various dresses and suits hanging, two boxes and four posts, which are open on three sides and framed with an incomplete roof.

And yet, despite the lack of intricate sets or additional actors, we see a portrait of Kahlo’s complex marriage to artist Diego Rivera, whom she would divorce and remarry; her numerous miscarriages; and her affairs, portrayed in the play as primarily lesbian but rumored to have included several famous men as well.

We also learn about her relationship with her father. Kahlo had said that the family’s patriarch insisted that she learn to walk and run despite the damage to her leg from polio.

The artist also claimed that the German-born Guillermo Kahlo was of Hungarian-Jewish background. This claim was widely accepted until a pair of German historians traced Kahlo’s lineage to that of German Lutheran Protestants.

Severo doesn’t mention this in her intimate portrait of the artist, but she does talk of her own disability. She was born with a congenital defect on her left hand and uses the presence of Kahlo’s injuries to discuss her challenges. She recalls the doctor who wanted to graft her toes onto her hand in place of her ill-formed fingers when she was 4. She decided not to undergo the procedure: She could already do handstands and play on a jungle gym, things the surgeon said she would be able to do after his untested technique, and she wondered how she could dance without digits on one of her feet.

And Severo can dance. Whether it’s through the brief opportunities she has to dance during the play, her movements in dresses and suits hanging from the clotheslines or the poses she strikes, which are more like the self-portraits Kahlo painted than an actor’s stance, she fills the stage with grace and presence.

The connection Severo feels with Kahlo is highlighted by a quote from the artist’s diary, which opens and closes the work: “I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me …”

Directed by Joanie Schultz, “Frida … A Self Portrait” gives voice to the strength of the artist who searched for truth, both because of and through the pain she endured, and who proclaimed, “My truth is that I will die, a woman on my own terms.” It also points to Severo’s truth — that no matter how strange a person feels because of disability or hardship, there is always a connection to the larger universe. PJC

David Rullo can be reached at drullo@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.