Mainstage presents premiere of thought-provoking work

The East Coast premiere of a play based upon the life of the filmmaker who chronicled the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany will be staged this month by the Department of Theatre and Dance at the State University of New York at Fredonia.

“Aunt Raini” will be the third event in the 2007-08 Walter Gloor Mainstage Series and will mark the East Coast premiere of a work by New Mexico playwright Tom Smith. There will be six performances in Bartlett Theatre at Rockefeller Arts Center: Feb. 22 and 23 at 8 p.m., Feb. 24 at 2 p.m. and Feb. 28 through March 1 at 8 p.m.

The play is based loosely on the life of Leni Riefenstahl, who spent the early part of her career as the official documentarian of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.

Smith explained he came across the story of Leni Riefenstahl through a documentary called “The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.”

“I had no idea prior to that film who she was,” Smith said. “It was on TV a few weeks after her death, so there were a lot of news stories about her and I just became really fascinated with her as a character.”

Smith said one of the initial challenges in writing “Aunt Raini” was to decide “how much biography I wanted and how much of the story did I want to make up.”

“Ultimately, I decided to make it very obviously about Leni, although she is never once named in the play,” he said. “This allowed me to more easily tell the story I wanted to tell, rather than simply write a biographical play.”

However, Smith said “about 90 percent of the story” is based on Riefenstahl’s real life.

“The play received an Equity (professional) workshop at the Caldwell Theatre in Boca Raton, Florida were it played to two sold-out houses.  From that experience, I made a few edits, cutting one character completely, and produced the play at a small theatre in Las Cruces, New Mexico,” Smith said. “It has since undergone a final re-write, which is what Fredonia audiences will see.  In fact, it will be the first time I've seen this version performed.” In Smith’s play, Aunt Raini dies suddenly and her niece comes into possession of the propaganda films Raini produced for the Nazi Party. The niece faces the dilemma of deciding whether her aunt’s work should be judged as significant art or as evidence of hate crimes.

“As an artist, I am always interested in the artist's ‘thumbprint’ on their work: how much should you be able to separate the artist from the art versus how much should you identify the artist behind the work,” Smith said. “Leni's story seemed to really grapple with that controversy.  She truly believed, since she was a documentarian, that she had no voice or point of view in her work.  Obviously, because of her connection to Adolf Hitler, many people disagreed with her.”

Directing “Aunt Raini” will be Tom Loughlin, a professor of Theatre and Dance at SUNY Fredonia.

“For us, the challenge of this play lies in the controversial nature of the material,” Loughlin said. “Because Leni Riefenstahl is such a controversial figure from Nazi Germany and her films still ignite passions from the Nazi era, we have to try to present the material with as much objectivity and fairness as possible and let the audience draw its own conclusions from the production.”

Loughlin explained the actors and production crew have been immersing themselves in the historical facts and issues surrounding the play.