Amazons and Their Men

Full Length, Drama

Characters: 2 male, 2 female

Int.

The Frau used to direct beautiful films for a fascist government. Now she's trying to make a film that's simply beautiful. The Frau casts herself in the lead role of the Amazon queen Penthesilea, who falls in love with Achilles on the battlefield of the Trojan War. She recruits a man from the Jewish ghetto to play her Achilles. Her own sister, a long-suffering extra, plays all the nameless Amazons killed in the background. With chariot crashes and adoring close-ups, it all has the makings of a glamorous war. But when telegrams start to arrive from the Minister of Propaganda, it becomes impossible for the Frau to ignore the real war outside her sound stage. A darkly comedic look at the role of artists during wartime, Amazons and Their Men is inspired by the life and work of Leni Riefenstahl.

"The life of Leni Riefenstahl...has been examined and critiqued aplenty, but rarely so entertainingly as in Amazons and Their Men, a brash play by Jordan Harrison."-The New York Times

" In a dramatic masterstroke, the playwright imagines Riefenstahl's film as it could have been..."-New York Press

"Filled with dazzling wordplay, archaic vocabulary, and odd malapropisms, the theatrical worlds of Jordan Harrison lift language off the page and into three-dimensional space, creating a universe that is surreal and sublime, brainy and beautiful-and wholly his own."-Brooklyn Rail