STAGE REVIEW : ‘Zelda’: A Trip Through a Tormented Mind

There are many questions about the high life and fast fall of Zelda Fitzgerald that may never be answered. Was the ego of her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, at the core of the schizophrenia that confined her to sanitariums for the last years of her life? Was it the fast lane they traveled as the glamorous sweethearts of the Roaring ‘20s, or was she just a little fish out of her depth in her husband’s big pond?

Playwright William Luce doesn’t answer any of these questions in “Zelda: The Last Flapper,” at the Tiffany Theatre, but he does paint a lucid and illuminating portrait of Zelda Sayre, the woman who fell for her knight in shining armor and followed him into literary history. Zelda loved Scott her whole life, even though the years eventually made the emotional ocean between them too wide for her grip on reality to bridge.

Luce based his script on Zelda’s writings. He uses a dramatically fascinating trick to reveal the self-revealing images that flash through his subject’s mind as she figuratively, and sometimes literally, bounces off the walls of her psychiatrist’s office in the sanitarium where her confused life approaches its end. Dr. Carroll has not shown up for their appointment, but Zelda remembers the pattern, the slow relaxation into a hypnotic state of recall, counting slowly backward from 100.

As she counts, moments return, not in a chronological tapestry, but quick, telling groups of stitches, now from the heady days in Paris with the rich and famous; now from Montgomery, Ala., phantom shadows of parents who didn’t understand her dream; now from the desperate years, when Scott discouraged her writing because her life was his subject matter. “I am his books,” Zelda complains, and at another time moans: “I wonder why I’m not what I thought I was.”

The often heartbreaking toboggan ride through Zelda’s mind, coherent even in its frequent confusion, is well-paced and shaped by director Guy Giarizzo.

As Zelda, Kathleen Garrett’s stylish performance has insights into the hard and soft edges of Zelda’s world, and is many colored and richly hued. Her transitions from Zelda’s manic to depressed moods are sure and seamless, and she mimics others in Zelda’s life as expertly as Zelda was known to do herself.

“Zelda: The Last Flapper,” Tiffany Theatre, 8532 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. Tuesdays-Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Ends July 1. $15; (310) 289-2999. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.