Review: "Arbus & West" at Triangle Productions — A Must-See Play

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US Premiere of a Play by Stephen Sewell

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Two women enter a room. One holds a camera. The other holds a legend.

At the onset of Australian playwright, Stephen Sewell's Arbus & West , the audience learns Diane Arbus will take her own life seven years after this photoshoot. It is a small piece of framing, and it recolors every scene that follows. What might otherwise read as the cool confidence of an artist at work becomes something far more haunted. Diane is woman discovering the full grip of her talent and quietly coming apart beneath it.

The set does nothing to suggest this darkness. Mae West 's Santa Monica penthouse is a vision of unabashed luxury. All white and gold, gleaming and immaculate, the kind of room that insists upon its own magnificence. The chaise longue positioned like a throne. Into this shrine of constructed beauty walks beatnik Diane Arbus with her camera, and the collision is immediate.

Triangle productions! closes its 36th season with this U.S. premiere, and the choice says something about the company's ongoing appetite for work that unsettles as much as it entertains. The premise is deceptively simple: photographer Diane Arbus has been commissioned to shoot the aging movie star. What follows is not a photoshoot so much as a slow, exquisitely painful excavation of image, of age, of the things women carry alone and never name aloud.

Cast:

Emily Sahler, Mae West

Tasha Danner , Diane Arbus

Carolina Selva, Ruby, Mae's assistant

Emily Sahler's Mae West is a performance of precision. A precision that is exactly the point. Every gesture is slightly too deliberate, every quip arrives half a beat too late, like a woman who has rehearsed charm so thoroughly she can no longer tell where the act ends and the person begins. Sahler never lets West tip into caricature, which would be the easy choice. Instead, she holds the audience in a state of suspended tenderness and dread, making us laugh at the wit while watching the effort behind it accumulate into something achingly sad. It is a performance of extraordinary command, and of great, quiet courage.

Tasha Danner 's Diane Arbus is something rarer still. She plays the photographer as a woman who has learned, with impressive discipline, to keep her interior life sealed. Arbus moves through the world with a professional attentiveness that functions as armor. With each question she asks of West, she redirects away from herself, every observation about her subject a way of ensuring the lens never turns around. Danner makes this containment completely believable, and completely heartbreaking. Knowing what we know, her composure reads not as strength but as tremendous effort. The darkness is there; she simply will not let it out. It is only when West, with the instincts of a woman long practiced in finding the weak spot in another’s armor, begins to really push, that Arbus allows the mask to slip. What surfaces is brief, raw, and almost gone before you can name it. It is quietly the most devastating part of the production.

Under the direction of Don Horn, Sahler and Danner generate the kind of chemistry that makes an audience lean forward as they are drawn into this story so cleverly crafted by Sewell.

Carolina Selva brings warmth and sharp timing to Ruby, Mae's devoted right-hand assistant. Her presence is more structurally important than it might first appear. Ruby is the audience surrogate; she is the one who watches both women and quietly absorbs what neither of them will say aloud. Selva plays her with a loyalty that reads as its own kind of heartbreak.

What makes the play genuinely uncomfortable is its refusal to assign moral high ground. Mae West 's image, with the double entendres, the rhinestones, the performance of sexuality entirely on her own terms, was, in its era, a form of power. She weaponized desire before women were supposed to know they could. And yet by 1964, that weapon is showing its age, and West polishes it furiously in that white-and-gold room, becoming aware that her era of feminism is being replaced by one that has no use for showgirls.

Arbus represents something newer and, the play argues, no less ruthless. Her feminism is the feminism of exposure, of stripping away persona to locate some truer, stranger self beneath. Arbus methodically dismantles every defense West has spent forty years constructing. The implication is quiet and merciless: Arbus has found her next subject, and she is Mae West .

Sewell is writing, ultimately, about beauty as a contract women are forced to sign, and what happens when those terms expire. West has constructed her entire personality around the premise that she is desired. The photographs Arbus takes, and which West famously hated, show something entirely different. They are, by any artistic measure, extraordinary. They are also, by any human measure, violating.

But the play doesn’t make Arbus simply the villain. What West is mourning is not youth exactly, it is the version of herself she chose, so many decades ago, and can no longer maintain.

The play's sharpest insight is into female antagonism, and how women undermine one another with perfect plausible deniability. Arbus’ cruelties arrive as compliments. West's attempts to reclaim control register as vanity rather than self-preservation. Each woman is trying to survive the other, and each is doing so by denying the other the thing she most needs. West wants to be seen as beautiful. Arbus wants to be taken seriously as an artist. Neither gets what she wants. The photographs become the result of two people failing.

That Sahler and Danner make all of this feel genuinely moving is the achievement of the production. These performances draw you in from the first exchange and hold you, off-balance, until the lights go down, and the knowledge you arrived with sits heavier than when you brought it in.

Triangle Productions! closes its 36th season with Arbus & West now on stage through June 20th.

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_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/portland/article/Review-ARBUS-WEST-at-Triangle-Productions-20260607)._