Lori Holt gets personal with ‘Colette”
For more than three decades, Holt has consistently delivered skilled, offbeat and deeply felt performances, from her years with the Eureka Theatre (she originated the role of Harper Pitt in Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America”) to her recent hilarious turn in Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.”
On Friday, April 5, Holt unveiled “Colette Uncensored,” a one-woman show she co-wrote with Zack Rogow and developed with director David Ford (the Bay Area’s guru of solo shows) about the celebrated French writer best known in this country for writing stories that inspired the movies “Gigi” and “Chéri.”
Within the intimate confines of The Marsh, Holt spends 75 minutes offering a sort of master class in how to charm an audience, woo them and, in a way Colette herself might savor, have her way with them.
The conceit is that Colette, born “in the pig farms of Burgundy,” as one of her husbands put it, as Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, is giving a lecture soon after the publication of her 1944 novel “Gigi” about a young girl being groomed as a courtesan.
Holt, with a head of auburn curls and wearing a chic scarf around her neck, begins behind a lectern but is soon reenacting the story of Colette’s life as if, well, she were starring in a one-woman biography.
Somewhat to her surprise, Colette didn’t mind and would go on to have affairs with women, even while she was moving in and out of marriages (she had three) and had a passionate affair with her stepson.
At a certain point in her life, she delights that her reputation as a writer has overtaken her reputation as a scandal magnet, and by the time Paris is overtaken by the Nazis, we’ve seen her as a naïve young wife, a successful actress, a journalist and a successful novelist.
Near the play’s end, shadows of World War II weigh heavily, and Holt masterfully navigates the darkness that leads to a bleak night when inspiration struck, and “Gigi,” a story about life and love and a bright young woman with a promising future was born.