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Last of the Red-Hot Dadas

by Kerry Reid

review by HLinda Harlos on CBC (winnipeg.cbc.ca) July 23, 2003
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Venue 7 - Playhouse Studio, Winnipeg Fringe Festival

At 50-something Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, once creative inspiration to artistic notables from photographer Man Ray to poet William Carlos Williams, is discreetly peeing behind a New York park bench, sporting a costume that would justifiably make Hedwig insanely jealous, awaiting her third class passage back to Europe with $10 in her possession. But to say that she's had a great run so far is to say that Mozart or Rachmaninov liked to tinkle the keys a bit.

While she's nobody's cliché, Baroness Elsa's path was reasonably well trod by creative, proto-feminist, erotically powerful women of her generation, born between the two world wars. For these women, the most reliable entrée into A list bohemian circles wasn't as independent creators, but by hitching their outsized aesthetic vision to some established male artist's wagon as muse, if not ghost-writer (yet another Hedwig parallel). Winnipeg theatre patrons may recall some years back (i.e., at the old Princess St. venue, before moving to Portage Place) PTE's staging of Canadian playwright (and now NDP Member of Parliament) Wendy Lill's stunning and memorable My Memories of You, about Canadian poet and novelist Elizabeth Smart, and/or may be familiar with Rosemary Sullivan's excellent Smart biography. Like Baroness Elsa, Smart used her sexuality to put a wide berth between herself and her bourgeois origins to enact her romantic vision of the bohemian, creative life. Both spent some mid-life time broke and embittered at the chasm of socio-economic fortune separating them and the men who prospered and were acclaimed for work conceived, mid-wifed and even financially supported by themselves. Her "crown of pricks" (analogous to Christ's crown of thorns) probably epitomizes Elsa's analysis.

Elsa is sufficiently honest that she prefers shit to honey as fly-bait. Among others, she verbally fixes Williams's little red wagon, dismissing him as a "satchel-carrying louse", the touted American democrat who grows tumescent over the prospect of meeting an exotic, titled European woman.

Contemporaries described Baroness Elsa as "the only woman who deserves the epithet 'extraordinary'"; "outrageous to an insane degree." The same might be said of performer Christina Augello, who portrays her. Both have chosen the "freedom of passion", tell the unvarnished truth ("the only thing worth living for"), declining to shut up for the world's convenience, and want to live in a world where they're honoured for their true selves. Is that too much to ask?

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