Plot Synopsis 

Vanessa Severo, the writer and performer of the play, takes the stage and recalls how reading a quotation of Frida Kahlo’s led to her travelling to Mexico City, visiting La Casa Azul (Frida’s home), and learning more about the painter. The quotation is: “I used to think I was the strangest person in the world. But then I thought… there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and hear this and know that, Yes, it’s true, I’m here… and I’m just as strange as you.” 

Vanessa changes her clothes and becomes Frida Kahlo, at home at La Casa Azul in Mexico City on July 13th, 1954. She is discussing one of her paintings, Lo que el agua me dio (What the Water Gave Me) with a journalist from Architecture Magazine, who has come to learn about her home. The painter is near the end of her life and struggles with constant pain and difficulty getting out of bed. 

Kahlo recalls how at six years old she contracted polio and had to spend months at home in this very room. Her father, a German immigrant named Guillermo, challenged her to overcome her physical limitations. 

Vanessa steps out of character and relates to us that she was born with a congenital disorder, which resulted in a left hand that wasn’t fully formed. Her parents immigrated to the United States from Brazil, where her father worked as an internal medicine doctor for the U.S. Army. A colleague of his suggested a procedure for Vanessa, to transplant some of her toes to her left hand. Vanessa’s father leaves the decision to four-year-old Vanessa and she decides not to have the surgery. 

Kahlo then takes us to another memory of hers. At age 19, she was involved in a bus accident where she was severely injured. A bus she was traveling on was hit by a streetcar, leaving Kahlo impaled and crushed. Her injuries required extensive treatment and recuperation, and it left her without the ability to have children. While at home recovering for two years, Kahlo began to paint. She credits the accident as one of two formative experiences. The other was meeting Diego Rivera, the famous Mexican artist. 

Kahlo met Rivera when she was 22. She asks him for his opinion of her paintings, and then begins to spend more time with him, including sitting for him to be painted. He believes she will learn about herself by seeing a portrait. The two fall in love and are married a year later. 

In 1931, Kahlo and Rivera relocate to San Francisco, where Rivera will be painting his first mural in the United States. They go to Detroit next for more of Rivera’s work. During this period, Frida has to end one pregnancy and miscarries another. 

Back in Mexico in 1935, Kahlo discovers that Rivera is having an affair with her sister, Cristina. The couple later divorce. Frida looks at herself in a mirror and attempts to reckon with her identity separate from Diego. 

Vanessa again breaks out of character to share a story from her own life. Once when her father did something wrong, her mother responded by silently washing individual dishes, drying them and then breaking them on the floor while her father pleaded for forgiveness. It was her mother’s way of showing her power and defiance. 

Returning to the interview, Frida reflects on the Portuguese word saudade, which she translates as “the deepest emotion and longing for someone or something which is now gone but might possibly return in the distant future.” It’s the best explanation she has for why, after divorcing Rivera in 1939, the two remarried in 1940. 

Frida shows the journalist her painting La Columna Rota (The Broken Column), painted in 1944 when she was wearing a metal corset after another spinal surgery she endured. Frida believes she will die soon as a woman uncelebrated in her own time, unlike Rivera, Picasso, and other contemporaries of hers. She then lets the journalist explore La Casa Azul on his own, requesting that he leave something for her in one of the closets. 

Vanessa recounts her trip to Frida’s home, La Casa Azul, which is now the Frida Kahlo Museum. It doesn’t feel like a home anymore to Vanessa, and she struggles to find much of Frida’s true presence there. Then she learns of the locked closet that no one was allowed to open until 50 years after Frida’s death. She sees it as a measure of power for Frida, to keep control over some mystery in her life. It seems like a challenge for Vanessa to imagine what is there, and she describes that feeling as saudade. 

Frida repeats the quotation that Vanessa read at the beginning of the show. 

End of Play