When She Danced

LAST DANCE Engstrom, right, reminisces with Alejandro Cordoba.

Photo: Johnny Knight

Don’t expect any dancing, at least not by Isadora Duncan, the subject of Sherman’s odd little 1990 play. And don’t expect to get much sense of what the American dancer-choreographer—who’s credited with rejecting the formalism of classical dance and scandalizing audiences with her embrace of both free dance and free love—actually did in performance. That’s despite a great deal of talk about the diva’s legendary recitals in Sherman’s script, which takes place in 1923, when Duncan was 45 and semiretired. It even becomes a repeated joke: Attempting to butter up an Italian schlemiel for a donation, Isadora describes her dance as communing with nature or interpreting Botticelli. Yes, he keeps replying, but what does it look like?

That incommunicable aspect of art is presumably at the heart of Sherman’s extensive language games; at least six languages are spoken by the visitors to Duncan’s Paris home. Her volatile, much younger husband (a mesmerizing Mulvey) speaks only Russian; a Greek piano prodigy translates for the Italian. Bowling’s cast handles this business with admirable technical proficiency. Brooks provides the audience surrogate, a Russian translator and longtime devotee of Duncan’s, with humor and a heartbreaking humility, while Engstrom is magnetic as ever as the mercurial artist. But TimeLine’s competent revival doesn’t answer the question of why Sherman chose this unlikely moment in Duncan’s life to tell her story.

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