A Fire that Burns

Mabel Dodge Luhan was a woman worth reckoning. The heiress of an East Coast banker, she was groomed to be well-married, which is exactly what she did—four times. In addition to her exploits among the social elite, Mabel was also an important patron of the arts, who most notably founded (and funded) the Taos literary and artists' colony in the 1920s and '30s. Along with her fourth husband, Tony Luhan, she hosted celebrities of the day like Georgia O'Keeffe, D H Lawrence and Willa Cather. An independently wealthy woman with a colorful love life, rubbing shoulders with the cultural select—Mabel's the kind of person who makes an ideal protagonist for a one-person play, which is exactly what Leslie Harrell Dillen has done in The Passions of Mabel Dodge Luhan.

Dillen first performed Mabel in 1994. An actress in a small theater company approached her about writing a solo piece about Mabel. Dillen's stepdaughter was attending Yale at the time, which is where all of Mabel's papers are—at the Beinecke Library—so Dillen stayed with her stepdaughter for a week to do research. She was surprised and overwhelmed to find 1,500 pounds of papers, ranging from Mabel's journals and essays to scrapbooks and letters. One particular piece stood out to her: an essay Mabel had written in 1931, on menopause. In it, Mabel wrote, "There is a fire that burns in us, yes in all of us, that is the sexual fire sublimated and become divine."

Inspired by this idea of keeping the internal fire ablaze, Dillen began to construct the play, but shortly thereafter, the actress who had commissioned the piece left town. By that point, Dillen had become attached to Mabel, so she took on the role herself.

"I felt like I was the instrument and Mabel was the music," she says. "It was an intuitive emotional collage. There's an arc in the piece following her life through her four husbands." After performing Mabel in 1994, Dillen moved away from Santa Fe and moved on to other material.

Now it's been over 20 years, and Mabel has found her way back to the stage. "When I moved back to Santa Fe, people asked, 'When are you going to do Mabel again?' Dillen says. "Finally, it became a pull; it's like Mabel was telling me it's time." Several serendipitous events coincided to lull Dillen's Mabel back to life. Biographer Lois Rudnick is planning a big show in Taos in 2016 about the artists Mabel influenced, and Dillen was asked to perform her solo for it. Then she was approached to be the voice of Mabel by a fellow putting together a documentary. "It was Mabel this, Mabel that, so it felt time to do it again," Dillen says, laughing.

Of course, the 20-year interim inherently puts a new spin on the play. Ed Hastings, who directed and helped develop the original Mabel back in 1994, died four years ago. Dillen's now working with director Kent Kirkpatrick, who also directed her full-length play Two Wives in India in 2011. Along with the restaging, Dillen has added new material on Mabel's life that only became public in the last 15 years.

"I hope audiences take away the power and inspiration of this woman's life," Dillen says. "Mabel had this wonderful phrase; she'd say, 'Use me, use my life. It's what I've always longed for—ways to be useful.'"

Dillen feels Mabel still holds relevance even by contemporary standards. Her ability to bring people together, her vivaciousness, her wit, her charm…a woman like Mabel Dodge Luhan doesn't come along every day, and neither does a woman like Dillen, with the theatrical flair and compositional skill to bring her home.

The Passions of Mabel Dodge Luhan
7:30 pm Thursday, Aug. 6 and 13, $10;
7:30 pm Friday, Aug. 7 and and 14;
2 pm Sunday, Aug. 9 and 16, $20.
Santa Fe Playhouse
142 E De Vargas St.,
988-4262

Santa Fe Reporter