STAGE REVIEW : Lesbian Jealousy Intensifies in ‘Tears’

Lesbian drama, almost by default, has for some time been the exclusive turf of female playwrights and directors producing under the umbrella of gay and lesbian theater. So it’s something of a surprise to confront the three-character lesbian passion drama, “The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant,” at the adventurous Open Fist Theatre Company in West Hollywood.

The director is a male, Dean Yacalis, and the playwright is the late West German filmmaker, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Fassbinder reportedly reversed the genders of an autobiographical episode when he wrote the play, which was later turned into a film. (For those who may remember Fassbinder’s 1972 movie, this Open Fist staging is tighter, with a harder veneer of humor.)

Director Yacalis, in a highly theatrical production that is coolly sensual and almost metallic, has caught Fassbinder’s hothouse perversions in all their brittle decay. Given the play’s lurid world, it’s quite an achievement, calibrated like a watch, inexorable in its movement, and, even in the most fierce anguish of lesbian jealousy, never overwrought.

We’re in the silken boudoir of an avaricious fashion designer (Kathy Dunn in the title role) who enjoys the sexual services of her love-smitten maid while saving her deepest, carnivorous love for her fetish of the moment--a callow, long-legged fashion model (Melissa Lechner) who treats her hostess with withering ridicule.

After a night of lovemaking (no nudity, unless largely imagined by the audience), the model exercises her power quickly. The master-slave syndrome assumes a brutal hilarity as the model taunts her patron/lover with a lascivious story of a one-night stand with a black man only hours earlier.

When the model takes a call from a man she identifies as her husband in front of the devastated fashion designer, then arranges to meet him and asks for plane fare from her outraged hostess and the lover she’s betraying, the play reaches a steamy crescendo. Simmering obbligatos follow, including a crucial little scene with the ever-watchful maid, a hovering figure delicately performed by Kelley McNamee in total silence (a great touch by Fassbinder).

The towering Lechner is perfectly cast as the soiled, spoiled manipulator. As the bedeviled and betrayed designer, Dunn (an Anne Bancroft look-alike) is scalding and, to the actress’s credit, pitiable in her obsession. As she lolls about in haute couture gowns or ponders her cheekbones in the mirror, her gleaming, jagged image assumes a frightening pallor.

Here is a plot that would be a potboiler in lesser hands. But the director and his cast know precisely what they’re after and how to execute it. This is not a likable play, but it’s intelligent and insidious. With the help of set designer David Early’s decorous den of iniquity, the playmakers create a self-contained, sealed-off world festering under glass.

* “The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant,” Open Fist Theatre, 1625 N. La Brea Ave., Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends Feb. 15. $10-$15. (213) 882-6912. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.