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San Francisco Chronicle​

In ‘Shameless Hussy,' Anaïs Nin makes incest and bigamy look conflict-free

Spend some time with Anaïs Nin, and you might start to feel like a monk, wondering why your life isn't all bread, cheese and olives followed immediately by sex on a chaise and capped off by some zesty journaling about it all. But in 'Shameless Hussy,' there are good reasons why the endlessly quotable diarist, essayist and erotica author is better at following her bliss than the rest of us are — chief among them a wealthy, obliging and selectively unseeing husband. In Lynne Kaufman's biographical play about the prolific writer and lover, he's so undemanding that, unlike all the other major male characters, he never shows up to speak for himself. At its best, the show, which opened Sunday, April 27, at the Marsh, makes you look past the privilege Anaïs (Arwen Anderson) enjoyed to wonder what truly holds back the rest of the world from slurping up life like a luxurious beverage. As Anaïs glides from her banker husband to her actor husband (married to both at the same time), from author Henry Miller to psychoanalyst Otto Rank to her own father, in a blood-curdling incestuous episode (all the men are played by Johnny Moreno), she has something more than wealth. Whatever switch it is in the brain that perceives sexual mores and responds to shaming, hers is permanently flipped off. While hopefully the rest of us can all agree on the norm against incest, Anaïs' effortless flouting of other conventions is provocation and inspiration alike. 'Shameless Hussy,' directed by Warren David Keith, gets a huge boost in this project from Anderson, an actor with eyes so expressive you think you see in them the ocean that a childhood Anaïs describes from a sailing ship. They glint with mischief; then, when Anderson embodies Anaïs' mother, they ice out the whole world. But it's not just the eyes, of course. When Anaïs describes an abortion — 'The child is lying at the door of my womb, strangling me like a demon' — Anderson makes the tension in her body so palpable that you, vicariously, might feel faint. Her chewy French accent, however, amplifies a serious shortcoming in the script, which is that our heroine keeps teaching us life lessons in a ponderous, self-reverential tone — ironic for someone so disdainful of morals. It's a bit as if 'Bartlett's Familiar Quotations' had become a stage show. Toward the end, 'Shameless Hussy' even starts to sound like its own book-jacket summary had made it into the script: 'I wrote for 60 years. I wrote a woman's life from girlhood to the end. And left out nothing.' If that's true of the play as well, then Nin might not ultimately be the most intriguing dramatic subject. In Kaufman's rendering, Anaïs comes off as self-possessed to the point of simplicity: It's no big deal to bust out of conservative feminine norms, because it doesn't trouble her. The loop is closed. Conflict is nil. Let the men who cycle in and out deal with their own feelings of jealousy and recrimination. Anaïs floats above it all, a mystery that might not have that much behind it.