The Story Of Mrs. Fitzgerald

It’s not easy to be rebellious, sexy, daring, ambitious, female and youthful all at once. It was especially not easy in the South at the start of the 20th century. But there she was, the adolescent Zelda Sayre, bobbing her hair, drinking, running out at night, teasing boys, relishing impropriety and wild to leave Montgomery, Ala.

F. Scott Fitzgerald gave her a way out, and, she hoped, a way up.

In Taconic Stage Company’s production of “The Last Flapper” in Copake Falls, Diedre Bollinger’s Zelda goes from girlish to wild, telling her story from “exceptional child” in her mother’s view, to crazed psychiatric inmate, abandoned by her husband and irritated by her doctor.

William Luce, who writes one-person plays about women of note — Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Bronte, Lillian Hellman — opens “The Last Flapper” with Zelda waiting for her doctor in his office. She rifles his drawers for notes on other inmates and sits on his desk to tell us her story.

Zelda met Fitzgerald when she was 18. “He was beautiful, with patrician bones and slightly intoxicated.” He was her “golden god.” And he became her partner in flamboyance. She jumped into a fountain in New York City wearing her evening dress, played golf in high heels and dumped her southern accent. They married, he became famous and the flapper was gradually diminished by “boredom, convention and childbearing.” While Fitzgerald partied with celebrities such as Isadora Duncan and Ernest Hemingway, Zelda saw “life was leaving me stranded.” She claims her husband stole her diaries for his accounts of wild society and her dreams of recognition as a writer, dancer and painter dwindled away.

Bollinger is very affecting as Zelda, who began life so bravely and ended up alone and afraid. And director Carl Ritchie draws a detailed and, finally, touching performance from her.