How do you come to terms with the legacy of an idol? The same way we always have — write a play about the person and emphasize relentlessly his or her weaknesses. Break the person down, and boldly confront all the things you were afraid to consider when he or she was around.
This is the plot of “Fallaci,” an original play by bestselling author Lawrence Wright. It remembers the gritty and beautiful journalist not as whom she was but as what she had become at the end of her life. Oriana Fallaci, who had, as her character says, “undressed” so many of the world’s most influential public figures, was portrayed as an old, irrelevant shut-in whose only satisfaction came from the bones she was thrown by her newfound audience on the far right. Chain-smoking and curmudgeonly, Fallaci conveys her unrelentingly critical opinions, which seem as much pleas for attention and relevancy as they were genuine ideas. As she became more tired, the efficacy with which Fallaci could cover her lies dwindled, and the inconsistencies in her stories were made humorously clear.
The show — as was its premise — was somewhat of an obituary, a teleological retrospective on the life of Oriana Fallaci. It is this telling of the story from its ending that is both the play’s strong point as theater and its weak point as narrative. Hearing Fallaci’s character tell the story herself to a young journalist is a wonderful way to present it. Additionally, the dialogue between the two cast members (there are, in fact, only two) makes the play, directed by Oskar Eustis, engaging and easy to follow.
Miryam, as a foil to Fallaci’s otherwise pontificating character, adds a lot of dimension to the play by challenging Fallaci, qualifying her story with insights and adding her own story to supplement the main narrative. On the other hand, by telling the journalist’s story from the end of her life, Lawrence Wright discounts half the value of the stories about her that are undoubtedly true.
Oriana Fallaci, whatever one may think of her later publications, did make tremendous waves in her day as a war reporter and journalist. She revolutionized the interview, getting personal with her subjects (in every sense) and saying to them, untempered, exactly what she thought. Approaching the interview with an aim to defeat is what allowed her to take subjects off guard and lead them to say things that would make the impact of her interviews, as Henry Kissinger once said, “disastrous.”
The messages that Fallaci brought out in her interviews — spoken or acted — were trophies for the cause she had fought for since she was a small child: to disobey the oppressive “as the only way to use the miracle of having been born.” Hearing about these experiences from a woman who is presented as spiteful and hallucinating her own cancer, however, simply does not do justice to these great moments and achievements.
In all, however, the dialogue of “Fallaci” was well-formed, and the play took on another dimension by telling the story of the young journalist. The script itself was generally well-written as well, save for the number of times that Fallaci’s character refers to herself in the third person (which feels every time like a glaring theatrical cliche in the middle of the dialogue) and the lack of coherence and intent throughout the play on Wright’s theme of Islamophobia, which he develops quite choppily. However, Concetta Tomei’s formidable performance as Fallaci carried the play through till the end, and one leaves the theater with a more nuanced perspective of the woman Fallaci was, became and has come to mean to us today.