About The Play
Almost Mata Hari - Lovers, Letters, and Killers is a full-length, completely-produced play available for theaters in the United States and Europe.The play had three workshop performances at Coney Island USA in New York and was produced Off Broadway by Obie Award winner Crystal Field. In 2016, the show was performed 12 times at the Theater for the New City in New York.
The play will have its European premiere at Berlin's Brotfabrik Theater in March 2017. The production was co-directed by Myrte Amons and Javier Mendez and the costume design was by Diana Gentleman. Almost Mata Hari - Lovers, Letters and Killers is based upon immersive playwriting process of Mata Hari. This earlier solo show was produced in 2015 by the Susan Batson Studio in Times Square.
Almost Mata Hari - Lovers, Letters and Killers is a 75-minute solo show, consisting of two acts plus a 15-minute intermission.
Eva Dorrepaal doubles as playwright and lead actress in this one-woman show, delivering an exceptionally compelling performance magically portraying multiple roles. The focus of the play is not biographical, but the creative process and its sources.
In the play, Ava prepares the role of Mata Hari, exploring a range of peculiar acting exercises, but soon finds her own history with men coming to the surface. The piece blurs the lines between acting and reality and is based upon two real life stories. Two women, a hundred years apart, both lost in the circle of dangerous love.
Mata Hari was notoriously known for revealing her body in "exotic dances" and having countless affairs with influential men on both sides of World War I's front lines.
Trapped in a spider web of men, Mata Hari was accused of counter espionage in Paris, and executed by firing squad. Fighting for her freedom until the very end, she refused to wear a blindfold.
Ava rehearses in her messy basement apartment, alone with her props, costumes and notes. Her struggle to resurrect Mata Hari prompts her to relive a dangerous love affair from her own past. Ava's lover Dragan was an irresistible mystic who worked as a street performer; an outcast from Serbia and Croatia who "liberated" himself and the women who loved him. A cult ritual claimed the life of his subsequent girlfriend.
Dragan: "In order to be healed, to liberate yourself, to be free... you have to have sex with me.
It opens up the chakra of creativity."
