92 THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020
A teen-ager soothes her pain with visions of Portmanesque prosperity.
THETHEATRE
DREAM ON
“All the Natalie Portmans” explores the limits of Hollywood fantasy.
BYVINSON CUNNINGHAM
ILLUSTRATION BY NHUNG LÊ
M
aybe you’ve seen the slightly un-
hinged Dior campaign starring
Natalie Portman. Whether that great
brand is using the ads to sell dresses
or perfumes, high heels or sunglasses,
or just waving its hand around and
reminding us of its lasting existence,
I couldn’t tell you; the product, as far
as I can see, is Portman herself, and
the bouquet of associations she car-
ries to the consumer’s front door—
and, as it happens, to an uneven but
intriguing new play called “All the
Natalie Portmans.”
But here, first, is a TV commercial,
which is itself a kind of abstract play:
Portman, as Miss Dior, flits from one
glossy frame to the next, all action, like
James Bond on a vaguely fun spring-
break vacation: she jumps off a pier
(who knows where?) into what looks
like a dubiously unperturbed and un-
polluted lake; does elegant doughnuts
in a pink sports car, spelling out in the
sand the word “love” in loopy script;
embraces some anonymous hunk with
enough passion for the last night on
earth before some gentle apocalypse.
Portman is everywhere, and everybody,
and having a ball. At the end of the
commercial, she walks toward the cam-
era, which settles on her face, in closeup:
the face that launched a thousand fra-
grant magazine pages—balmed-up lips,
efficient nose, chiselled cheeks, hon-
eyed eyes. “What would you do for
love?” she asks, suggestively, but she
looks less like a lover than like some-
one so intoxicatingly free—of difficulty,
of context—that, like most totems of
prosperity, she galvanizes and alienates
us in almost equal measure.
I thought of the ad, with its utter
placelessness and its wordless hints of
easy wealth, as I watched “All the Na-
talie Portmans,” written by C. A. John-
son and directed by Kate Whoriskey,
at the Robert W. Wilson MCC The-
atre Space. You want to know what
you’d do for love? Try this: Keyonna
(Kara Young) is a black sixteen-year-
old growing up in northeast Wash-
ington, D.C., living under the weight
of crushing problems within her fam-
ily. She’s the anti-Miss Dior: her fa-
ther’s dead, her mother’s an addict,
and she and her older brother, Sam-
uel ( Joshua Boone), are on the verge
of being tossed out of their apartment,
and far too acquainted with day-to-
day hunger. Keyonna’s circumstances
are all too specific; context clings to
her like a shadow.
Still, love abounds where freedom
doesn’t: Keyonna and Samuel look out
for each other, even as they settle into
a strange love triangle. Samuel is en-
amored of—and engaged in a strained
“friends with benefits” relationship
with—Chantel (Renika Williams),
whom Keyonna, unbeknownst to Sam-
uel, has recently kissed. Keyonna is
out; Chantel isn’t. Romance is almost
as painful for Keyonna as her relation-
ship with her mother, who disappears
whenever she wants to, and shows up
without the money the family needs
for rent.
Keyonna dreams of being a screen-
writer, and tends monastically to a col-
lage on the living-room wall: the faces
of the actresses, mostly white, who pop-
ulate the movies that she loves. She
soothes herself with stories, while her
mother and brother tease her for her
taste. Why doesn’t she watch some-
thing a little ... blacker? Whoopi Gold-
berg is the sole black face on the wall,
a little visual joke that had me laugh-
ing as soon as I noticed it. The collage
is dominated by pictures of Portman,
who, before long, starts showing up
in the flesh (played by Elise Kibler),
