The smallest detail can sow the seed of a full-length work, and that’s what happened for Lydia Blaisdell, a bold new voice in American theater whose play The Silent Woman won the biennial Prize for Women Playwrights from the Kentucky Women Writers Conference (KWWC). The Silent Woman tells the strange, true tale of a painter living with an effigy of his ex-lover in 1919 Germany. Stabbed in the lung by a bayonet in World War I, Oskar Kokoschka convalesces at the estate of a Dresden patron, coping with heartbreak over the loss of his love, Alma Mahler, who has married celebrated architect Walter Gropius.
The Silent Woman will have its world premiere at the Downtown Arts Center on Nov. 5-7, 2015. The play is directed by Eric Seale, formerly of Actors Guild, and is produced by him in collaboration with KWWC and the University of Kentucky College of Arts & Sciences. It stars a top-notch cast of veteran Kentucky actors: Bethany Finley as the maid Hulda, Darius Fatemi as the painter Oskar, and Bob Singleton in multiple roles as the the butler, the coachman who courts Hulda, and the policeman.
Asked what inspired the play, Blaisdell explained, “I didn’t learn about the doll-fetish until I was pretty deep into Kokoschka’s work. It was some art historian’s note on an image, this is a painting of what maybe was a life-sized doll of his ex-lover. The brushwork etc. . . . I was fascinated by that whole episode. Who would do such a thing? Why did he agree to publish his letters to the doll-maker a few short years later? What did Alma, his ex-lover, think of the whole episode?”
In the play, Oskar persuades the scullery maid Hulda to serve as a ladies maid to the effigy. Hulda, too, was inspired by a detail in Blaisdell’s research: “The first photograph I found of the doll-fetish had a young woman kneeling at its feet, while the doll sat in a chair. That image and the idea of a living, breathing woman kneeling at the feet of an idol is ultimately the seed of the play. And as much as the play is about Oskar, I’m equally concerned with Hulda, the maid. Who are the people that exist just beyond the frame of the History of Great Men?”
In 2013 Blaisdell received a Jerome Travel and Study grant to travel to Vienna and Berlin to research The Silent Woman. “I’ve always been drawn to Austrian Expressionism. There’s so much movement in the work, and there’s this ability to capture a person’s interior state. I was hooked on fin de siècle Vienna as this amazing historical moment. Painters were writing plays and composers were painting. I love to think about the composer Arnold Schoenberg arguing with Kokoschka at a salon. In that time, before the war, there was a fluidity and a concentration of aesthetic concerns across forms.”
Lydia Blaisdell is a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas, and will make her first visit to Lexington for opening night. Her short plays have been performed in New York City, Austin, Aspen, Lake George, and Paris, France. She received her B.A. in English Literature from Columbia in 2009.
Performance schedule: Thurs., Nov. 5, 7:30 pm / Fri., Nov., 6, 7:30 pm / Sat., Nov. 7, 2 pm and 7 pm
Where: Downtown Arts Center, 141 Main St., Lexington, KY
Tickets: $15 adults, $10 students
Box office: 859.425.2550 or purchase online or visit lexingtonky.gov/dac
NOTE: The Silent Woman contains adult themes, situations, and language. Viewer discretion is advised.