May 28 - June 14 2025
CURRENT PRODUCTION
LENI'S LAST LAMENT
A play by GIL KOFMAN
Directed by RICHARD CALIBAN
With OBIE Award Winner - JODIE MARKELL*
May 26 -June14 2025
In Leni’s Last Lament, which swept top awards at its one-night-only performance at United Solo Festival in Manhattan, and picked as one of the top 5 shows to see at the Edinburgh Fringe 2024 - Hitler’s controversial filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl poses as a misunderstood victim as she attempts to justify and sanitize her notorious past. Set in Leni’s editing room and presented as a macabre, comic cabaret with a live accordionist, the play is a wild, ironic ride full of hard-to-believe insights into this provocative figure as she reassembles her life to create a more palatable portrait. Presented by Factory Paradise Theater
LENI'S LAst LAMent
At the risk of sounding immodest, I just want to say that Leni’s Last Lament is one of those rare plays (like a visiting comet) that aligns itself perfectly and congruently with the political zeitgeist of our times - and does so with trenchant humor as well as heartfelt psychological insights.
An historical satire/cabaret - the play explores the life of Leni Riefenstahl, who was Hitler’s notorious filmmaker. Gifted with incredible talent that was only outmatched by her ego and ambition, Leni was willing to overlook the Nazi ethos so long as she could make her films; her life replete with adventures and experiments, but never any apologies. She often insisted she was blithely making art, and not responsible for the Fascism it supported, while through the play, her ostentatious denials are continually subverted by her ego as she boasts of her glorious past and keeps putting her foot in her mouth. Ultimately, the play offers a fabulous portrait of one of the greatest and earliest female filmmakers, while carefully tracing her trajectory of self-delusion and moral debasement.
Leni's Last Lament shows how even talented people can talk themselves of what's right and moral when there's prizes and awards to be had. By doing so, the play insidiously draws the audience into its narcissistic orbit with the scalpel of satire instead of a blunt polemic sledgehammer - and holds up a mirror to our own complacency and self-deception.
Equally absurd as it is cautionary, Leni’s Last Lament is as much a character study, as it is an historical piece. The melding of the two is what makes the show singular and memorable. Rather than simply being an outright condemnation and dismissal of Leni - the play is a careful interrogation of a complicated character that invents herself nightly before the Audience through the alchemy of lies, self-delusion and appeasement - something far or foreign to us these days. Sadly, our world is more than primed for this production; a show where lies and depravity are easily glossed over by ambition.