Director’s Note

I’m drawn to the aspect of the play that challenges identity. So many different versions of the artist were ever-present: public, private, manufactured, organic. But Frida repeated that her self portraits were her truest self. She lived through her work, and she painted herself because she was the only thing she really understood. Yet, from a dramaturgical point of view, she made self-portraits because she needed others to understand her. In Malán’s work, Frida explores her history, and it seems to pose the argument that we are the lives we live. But I think Frida, the real person, would want us to understand that we are who we say we are. And in her art , she fought to make that argument heard. So in our production, I want to honor her in that way. I am dedicated to making sure we see not just her history and her portraits but that we see and understand her. She was a complicated obsessive, traumatized individual. Audiences should experience the great tragedy of her life. But they should also learn the lesson she was trying to teach us all in her surrealit work: that we want others to see our interiority, and must fight to make ourselves seen.