STAGE REVIEWS : Jens’ ‘Marlene’ Remains a Mystery at Gem Theatre

Salome Jens as Marlene Dietrich?

She has the husky voice, the long legs. She knows how to stand--regally, and how to straddle a chair--provocatively.

When she sings, she steers her arms and fingers through the air with crisp precision, just like Dietrich. She carefully caps many of the songs with a sharply turned left profile.

What Jens lacks--in “An Evening With Marlene: Falling in Love Again,” at Grove Shakespeare’s Gem Theatre--is the Dietrich gaze. And a script that does more than just gaze at its subject.

Writer Sebastian Milito has Dietrich recall a derisive comment about how she “veils her eyes.” In fact, that veiled look in Dietrich’s eyes was an essential part of her mystery--and her allure.

Jens’ expressive eyes, on the other hand, hold very little back. Mystery is not her forte.

Does it matter? Jens twice utters a maxim about the importance of the truth, as opposed to the mere facts. She’s not attempting a physical impersonation. She’s going for psychological verity.

She often succeeds. While she may not be Dietrich, she seems to understand her. A show like this is supposed to shed some of the mystery about its subject, so maybe the absence of mystery in her eyes isn’t all that important.

The script, however, doesn’t help much in that process of illumination. It’s drawn almost exclusively from Dietrich’s autobiography--and condensed to fit into an evening at the theater. So these are just the highlights of Dietrich’s carefully tailored and self-censored thoughts.

This problem plagues many a biographical monodrama. At least Milito has eliminated another common problem of the genre: the occasion for Dietrich’s talk doesn’t seem completely fake.

She’s depicted on a New York stage, rehearsing for the opening of her one-woman concert. Because her stage appearances did include pro forma autobiographical comments, it’s not unlikely that she would practice those parts of the show, as well as the songs themselves. Furthermore, she has an onstage listener.

Pianist Armin Hoffman not only accompanies her on the songs. He’s also a silent, sympathetic ear--and her stand-in when she assesses her own lighting. As we see her calculating the lighting (actually designed by Michael Gilliam) so obsessively, we grasp how well she had mastered her own presentation. But this show doesn’t take us beyond that well-crafted image.

We learn about the little German girl who got into trouble for presenting flowers to a French prisoner of war while World War I raged--and how she grew up to become a tireless trouper in the anti-Nazi war. She was also a doting mother, secretly devoted to cooking and cleaning despite her glamorous image. No, she never cared about being a big star; Milito never corners her into considering whether that’s the whole truth.

Her talk of her love life goes a bit deeper. She admits she couldn’t connect permanently with a man, despite her long marriage and her love for actor Jean Gabin. Referring to herself and men as “ships passing in the night,” she acknowledges she’s sorry she “didn’t drop anchors in more ports.” She “could not love” her mentor Josef von Sternberg.

That’s about as far as it goes. Was her inability to “drop anchor” due to the self-sufficient “world of women” that she grew up in? That thought doesn’t appear to cross Dietrich’s mind.

In other words, these fleeting glimpses of a fascinating life don’t develop along any particular course. We go from one mood to the next, more or less at random. Dietrich isn’t learning anything as she goes; she’s simply repeating familiar emotions and thoughts for the benefit of her act.

There are some musical highlights. Jens makes “The Laziest Girl in Town” as droll as the day it was born. Jules Aaron’s adroit staging of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” evolves from a first-time run-through--with Jens standing behind pianist Hoffman, looking at the sheet music--into a gripping center-stage tableau.

Jens wears three Emelle Holmes outfits equally well: a taupe pantsuit that emphasizes those long legs, an elegant rose robe and a formal white gown.