Playwright Vanessa Severo finds deeply personal connection with real-life artist in 'Frida'

Actress-playwright Vanessa Severo didn’t know much about iconic Mexican artist Frida Kahlo until a conversation with a friend sent her on a 10-year journey of discovery.

“We met for coffee, and during our conversation he said to me, ‘I see a Frida Kahlo in you,’ ” Severo recalls. “And I thought, what does that mean? So I started researching her and became fascinated with this woman who as an artist was ahead of her time.”

The result of that journey is Severo’s one-woman show, “Frida … A Self Portrait” which makes its local debut at Writers Theatre under the direction of Joanie Schultz, a familiar name in Chicago theater who is now associate artistic director of Cincinnati’s Playhouse in the Park.

A portrait of Kahlo’s life, the solo show also includes elements of Severo’s own life and challenges. It took her more than 10 years to reach the final iteration of the piece.

Severo, who is Brazilian American, completed a first 45-minute draft in 2013 and had a successful run performing it at The Living Room, a storefront theater in Kansas City, Missouri, where she lives. It focused on what Severo calls the “tragedies in Frida’s life” among them her diagnosis of polio at age 6, a bus accident at 18 that left her in lifelong pain, several miscarriages and her tumultuous marriage to artist Diego Rivera.

“Frida was doing early selfies with her paintings, these self-portraits that expressed her pain and challenges in a society where women were meant to sit and look pretty. I found it amazing that she could navigate so boldly through these tragedies and overcome them in such a bold way," Severo says.

Yet Severo knew she wasn’t done with developing the piece, and she applied for and received a Theatre Communications Group fellowship that allowed her to take her research to the next level, traveling to Mexico City to “immerse herself in the city where Frida lived.” (The city’s ubiquitous clotheslines strung between apartment buildings would inspire the show’s set. They are hung with items used as props, costumes and puppets that assist Severo in bringing the story’s characters to life.)

By 2018 Severo had rewritten “Frida” and contacted Schultz, with whom she had previously worked in Kansas City, and asked her to direct. The partnership would make the piece even richer and deeper.

“Working on ‘Frida’ has been one of the amazing, profound experiences of my life,” Schultz says. “I didn’t know at the time that it would turn into this incredible show that we would do over and over again.”

And then the pandemic hit, and “Frida” sat on the shelf. But just before that Schultz had asked Severo a pointed question that rattled around in her head: “What is the thing that is drawing you to Frida?”

The question fostered a revelation that prompted Severo to sit down again with the play and rethink it: “It was the one gift of the pandemic: to have the time to sit with it longer. I realized I couldn’t tell Frida’s story without telling my own.”

Severo has a congenital defect on her left hand and, in her early theater training, was told the more she hid it the better she was doing. It was something she had become adept at: “Find a pocket, hold a jacket over it, contort my body,” she explains.

“I had to unschool myself from that idea and be authentically myself just as Frida was authentically herself. Otherwise, I was telling a lie. The daunting part was actually letting the left side of my body move with the equalness of the right. It was like being in a new skin for the first time.”

As she added more of her personal story to the play’s final 90-minute draft, Severo’s connection to Kahlo deepened. She also added new dance and movement elements especially to help define Kahlo’s physical challenges.

“Vanessa is a dynamic and magnetic performer," Schultz said. "Her Frida is funny, she’s quirky, she’s a little mean, she’s Frida but then she’s also Vanessa and just very personable. It’s not just a historical piece; there’s a real human element to the performance.”

Severo, 46, says she will stop performing “Frida” when she turns 47 (Kahlo died at 47).

“I feel that would be the honest thing to do. Frida was about truth, even if it didn’t align with everyone else’s — she believed in her own truth. So, I want to honor that. And play the role truthfully.”

But she doesn’t want the play to simply disappear.

“The piece is, of course, extremely personal for me, but I would be very interested in finding and working with other artists who feel aligned with Frida Kahlo and would want to insert their own stories in between the columns of her storyline. I think this play could live on with other artists.”