We get not one but two Susan Sontags in Moe Angelos’ “Sontag: Reborn.” The first is the younger version, beginning in the late intellectual’s teenage years, as she begins a search for self-identity, both literary and sexual. The other, projected on video, is the familiar older figure, with her trademark shock of white hair and ever-present cigarette. As she ruefully observes her younger self in all her restless intellectual enthusiasm, the effect suggests a contemporary “Krapp’s Last Tape.”
Adapted, by Angelos, from the author’s early journals, and presented jointly by the New York Theatre Workshop and the Builders Association, “Sontag: Reborn” is a dazzling multimedia experience, as visually stunning as it is illuminating.
Seen behind a scrim sitting before a desk teeming with books, the youthful, precocious Sontag is prone to such pronouncements as, “Childhood is a terrible waste of time” and “I want to sleep with many people.” After her first lesbian experience, at 16, she declares, “Everything begins from now.”
Nevertheless, the next year she married writer Philip Rieff, though it clearly wasn’t a happy experience. “Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor,” she says.
What Sontag really loved was books and movies, both of which she consumed voraciously. As she flings volumes onto the table, we see swirling projections of quotations and author’s names — Gide, Dante, Rimbaud, Dostoyevsky, Miller and countless others — intimidating in their breadth.
Her own literary ambitions began to be realized at 30, with the publication of her first novel, “The Benefactor.” In one of the show’s most moving moments, she crawls on top of her desk and curls into a fetal position after reading a withering newspaper review.
Under Marianne Weems’ technically bravura direction, Angelos — a member of the theater company the Five Lesbian Brothers — delivers a superb portrayal, conveying the younger Sontag’s endless quest for knowledge as well as the emotional sacrifices it entailed.
The show’s title is apt. “Sontag: Reborn” restores this complex literary icon, who died nearly a decade ago, to vividly fascinating life.