Theater Review / The Last Flapper, A tour de force

By Joanna Brady

I have always been in awe of shows performed by one actor. Being on the stage alone, with nobody else to interact with has to require a lot of nerve, confidence, and a prodigious memory, as well as the ability to perform. Add to that the challenge of playing other characters as well as a complex one like Zelda Fitzgerald! A tall order.

Stephanie Miller, a Canadian part-time Key West resident with outstanding talent does just that, and manages to do it all with deceptively effortless ease under the astute direction of the Fringe’s Rebecca Tomlinson in The Last Flapper.  Miller’s range of emotion is amazing, moving from the feisty patient of an asylum to the angry wife, to spouting vitriol against Ernest Hemingway, to being the little girl talking to ‘Daddy’ or ‘Mama,’ to portraying her shrink. 

The subject is the ever-fascinating Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, who, against the wishes of her family, married F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 1920s Jazz Age after he convinced her of his genius. She was a Southern belle from Montgomery; he was a Princeton drop-out, Catholic, and worse—a Yankee. Her parents didn’t even attend her wedding. 

The play, which opens Tuesday, Nov. 19, is playing at the historical Key West Woman’s Club for a very limited run. The Club is the perfect setting for this intimate play featuring Zelda looking back on her life. 

For some years, the Fitzgeralds were the golden couple, with Zelda ‘the wife of’ a  brilliant writer. As they romped through Europe and New York kicking up their heels with hedonistic abandon, drinking, drugging, and writing, Zelda’s own talents were largely ignored and repressed. But the couple’s tumultuous notoriety is well-chronicled in Zelda’s private diaries, and in the play they are summoned as witnesses to memories by a woman falling deeper into madness.

The play, begins with Zelda in her final years, drawing from her writings as she recalls her life. It’s a single act work by playwright William Luce, whose forte is showcasing historical characters in plays performed by one only actor. 

As Luce indicates, it has become clear from her writings that Zelda’s talents were considerable in her own right. When Zelda was not in the grip of her addictions to drugs and alcohol, she wrote with clarity and brilliance. She had other talents, too. Zelda was a dancer, a published writer, and an artist; but her marriage to Fitzgerald was disastrous and led to her spiral into madness.

 “The Last Flapper” takes place at the Ashville, N.C. sanatorium in which middle aged Zelda spent the last years of her life. When a therapy session is canceled, Zelda, alone in the doctor’s office, exults in the opportunity to snoop. It is early in the evening of March 10, 1948—the date she died in a fire at the facility. Considering psychiatry nothing better than witchcraft, she nevertheless allows herself to be ‘hypnotized’ by counting backwards from one hundred by ‘the doctor’ using his voice to begin the countdown that continues till the end of the play. 

Zelda peeks at her medical file, steals the doctor’s cigarettes, and nibbles from his supply of bonbons, eventually trashing his office. Zelda, often talking to the absent doctor, takes us through her troubled past: her Southern aristocratic parents, her rebellion and marriage to Fitzgerald. Their whirlwind life together and the tragic way their relationship gradually disintegrated—largely blamed on Scott’s constant attempts to repress her creative efforts. It was her submission of a novel to Fitzgerald’s editor that led to Zelda’s institutionalization by her husband.

As Zelda battled her demons, Fitzgerald’s own alcoholism only fueled her addictions. She refers to him as ‘F. Scotch Fitzgerald’ in the play, though even as she sinks into the abyss, she admits, “I loved him.” For all her bravado and anger, it’s obvious that had things been different—without booze or drugs or Hemingway stirring up trouble, and with the liberty to express herself, they might have been good together.

That’s what I would ask Zelda if I could meet her today. Since that isn’t possible, Stephanie Miller’s dynamic performance offers us a chance to see one side of Zelda’s schizophrenic soul as conceptualized by William Luce. The play is a tour de force, well-worth seeing.

“The Last Flapper” opens Tuesday, Nov. 19, at the historic Key West Woman’s Club and runs through Nov. 23. All curtains at 7:00 pm. There is a brief intermission.

This is a very short run and space is extremely limited, so book tickets asap! Go to www.fringetheater.org/tickets or call 305 731-0581

(Joanna Brady is a local writer, author of the historical Key West novel, The Woman at the Light, published by St. Martin’s Press)

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