The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant | Trap Door Theatre
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Before Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a filmmaker he expressed his contempt for bourgeois convention onstage, joining Munich’s experimental Action Theater in 1967. According to one contemporary account, its raucous shows featured “random and irrational factors…but also vehemently passionate acting, and a light, nonchalant kind of aggressiveness.” Fassbinder took a cooler approach when he filmed one of his early plays, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, in 1972. One critic said that Fassbinder depicted the infatuation of famous fashion designer Petra with ambitious, self-absorbed model Karin so languorously that he turned the work into a “lesbian slumber party.”
McKean’s opacity gives Nicole Wiesner the jump start she needs to take Petra to an astonishing level of emotional honesty. As the play’s story spins out of control, the characters become increasingly outrageous parodies of fashion-world types. But because Wiesner makes the underlying truth of Petra’s emotional torment grow in proportion to Fassbinder’s grotesque distortions, the show remains deftly poised between melodrama and tragedy. There’s no easy interpretation of this unstable, richly ambiguous evening.
