Dual Citizens

Dual Citizens is the umbrella title for two separate monologues, Look, What I Don't Understand and Broken Nails: A Marlene Dietrich Dialogue. The former features Anthony Nikolchev, the American-born son of a Bulgarian emigre whose experiences as a political refugee have inspired Look Spanning the years 1944-1969, the play opens with a man (Nikolchev) staring out at the audience from the confines of a cage which ingeniously symbolizes all the jails and camps he has spent time in while attempting to make his way to freedom. Now, poised "at the gates to America," he looks back on 25 years of dealing with brutal border guards and corrupt immigration officials during an odyssey that has taken him from behind the Iron Curtain to Turkey, Italy, South Africa and the USA.

Sometimes allowed to work at a decent job, other times slaving away like a beast of burden, the unnamed hero of Look fights for survival every step of the way, enduring every kind of abuse imaginable, from brutal beatings to abject humiliation. A kind of Emigre Everyman, his story is brilliantly dramatized and acted by Nikolchev.

Broken Nails features Anna Skubick and a life-sized Marlene Dietrich puppet, which she manipulates with much skill and dexterity. The Polish-born Skubick gives us a Dietrich at the end of her life: old, alone, embittered, but still capable of recapturing flashes of her famous stage performances (and steamy love life). Clad in a man's shirt and tie (shades of the bi-sexual Dietrich), Skubick plays the part of a Dietrich groupie-turned-caregiver. Her Dietrich impersonations (especially her songs) are done well, but unfortunately most of the play's dialogue is made incomprehensible by her thick Polish accent.