There's nothing quite as impressive as one who is faced with personal trials and deals with them uncomplainingly.

Oops, we're talking here about Mexican artist and quasi-revolutionary Frida Kahlo, who wallowed to the point of revelry in the physical maladies and emotional torment of her life, and left them upon her death for posterity in more than 150 pieces of artwork that, since the 1980s, have received new acclaim from collectors and connoisseurs.

Teatro de la Luna's latest effort - “Frida Kahlo, La Pasión” - revisits the tempestuous side of the artist's life, in the U.S. premiere of a work by Argentinean playwright Ricardo Halac. Good performances and good pacing help overcome a script that is at times more mild than wild.

It chronicles the artist's tempestuous relationship with her on-again-off-again husband, Diego Rivera, and their collective connubiations (I think I made that word up, but it does the trick) with fiery superstar actress Maria Félix.

In life, each of the characters cheated on the other extensively, although in this show it is Rivera's infidelities that are the center of attention.

Teatro's effort spices up the task at hand by casting physically appealing actors in the roles of Kahlo (who in life was plain and single-browed) and Rivera (whose girth at times approached a zeppelin-like state).

The work of Teatro veterans Anabel Marcano (Kahlo) and Peter Pereyra (Rivera) is quite strong. But the real fun is reserved for Cynthia Urrunaga as Maria the actress. At turns nasty and sympathetic, her motivations are unclear throughout - is she a home-wrecker, or simply out to entertain herself? It's a solid job Urrunaga does.

(The show ends with a visit by Death, played in a gloriously creepy way by Cynthia Ortiz-Urrunaga, with help from the costume and lighting departments.)

Regular readers know that, for me, timing is everything, and, with a run time of just about two hours, this show made its point and departed the stage. Credit director Mario Marcel for keeping the action moving . . . and in using every available inch of space in the relatively tight confines of Gunston Arts Center Theatre II to do it.

Among the technical kudos, credit Rosita Bécker and Nucky Walder for costumes, Marcel for the set and Ayun Fedorcha for the lighting. It all added up to quality.

There was a full house for the opening Saturday matinee, which is a good thing, but also a reminder that, when crowded, Gunston II makes you feel like you are in the middle seat of cattle class in a jetliner headed off to Europe. I did not have the fortune of having waif-like creatures on either side of me, either.

The show is presented in Spanish, with English surtitles projected above the stage. Sometimes Teatro does this, sometimes it uses live translation; each works equally well.

Washington Blade Fragmented composition TEATRO DE LA LUNA’S FRIDA KAHLO PLAY PROVES A MESSY CANVAS Mexican painter Frida Kahlo was never easily classified. “They thought I was a Surrealist,” she once said, “but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” And as a woman, the captivatingly eccentric, bisexual communist who twice married bigger-than-life muralist Diego Rivera and enjoyed love affairs with Leon Trostky and assorted females, was equally difficult to pigeonhole. One thing is for sure however – everything Kahlo did was marked by an overriding passion. Arlington’s Teatro de la Luna is now exploring the artist’s fabled life with Argentine playwright Ricardo Halac’s “Frida Kahlo, la pasión,” a Spanish language production with easy-to-read English surtitles and gorgeous Mexican incidental music. Set in the rooms of Kahlo’s fanciful home, “la casa azul” (the blue house), Halac’s work focuses on the painter’s long and complicated relationship with Rivera and to a lesser extent the ongoing pain (and later miscarriages) resulting form injuries suffered in a horrific bus accident when she was a teen. Halac’s Kahlo – played with the requisite intensity by Anabel Marcano – is obsessed with Diego (Peter Pereyra) and masochistically assumes the role of third wheel in his affair with another Mexican icon and Kahlo “frenemy,” film superstar Maria Felix (a low key but charming Cynthia Urrunaga). Kahlo’s fixation on Diego’s infidelities is at times a drag, but mercifully these rants are interrupted by memories of past joys and pains – gracefully introduced by director Mario Marcel. As iconic Kahlo, Marcano looks spot on – she has the heavy, dark brows and wears the embroidered blouse and formless skirts, the then-uniform of indigenous women. Her pinned-up braids are laced with pink ribbon and at times a laurel of flowers graces her head. With Pereyra’s thatch of wild hair and bohemian stride, the actor has ably and sensitively created a believable errant husband and conflicted artist who paints armed Mexican peasants for American millionaires, but nonetheless he’s woefully miscast as the big-bellied, frog-faced Rivera. The essential question of this story’s love triangle is what do these women see in this great “pachyderm,” this “toad?” The answer is Rivera’s Rabelaisian charm, talent and life force – and not Pereyra’s inescapable good looks. In an otherwise elegantly staged production, an upstage scrim awkwardly divides casa azul’s interior from its courtyard (where Kahlo often imagines Diego and Maria to be wandering). A revelatory scene late in the play reveals the irritating sheer curtain’s true purpose: Just prior to the opening of her last art show in Mexico City, the invalid Kahlo, lying in a bed she has had transported to the gallery, spends some time alone with her paintings. While she touchingly speaks to her works as if they were her children about to go out into the world, enormous renditions of the artist’s deeply personal, fantastical paintings, including the very recognizable masterpiece “Self Portrait with Monkey 1940” (owned by Madonna), are projected on the scrim.

Washington Post Rekindling Frida Kahlo, With Little Fuel Teatro de la Luna's Idling 'Passion' Special to The Washington Post Thursday, February 14, 2008; Page C05 The volcanic emotional life of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo erupts with all the urgency of molasses in Teatro de la Luna's latest offering, "Frida Kahlo: La Pasión" ("Frida Kahlo: The Passion"). The play, by Argentine dramatist Ricardo Halac, lumbers dutifully back and forth along the arc of Kahlo's celebrated career, pondering her relationship with her none-too-faithful husband and fellow artist Diego Rivera, and recording her staggering tolerance for physical and psychological pain. It's a nuts-and-bolts chronicling that might strike American audiences as over-familiar, given the Kahlo cult of recent decades and pop-culture artifacts such as Julie Taymor's 2002 biopic, "Frida." What is worse, director Mario Marcel's production moves at such a dawdling pace that watching it sometimes feels like watching paint dry. Heck, you are watching paint dry. Marcel, also acting as set designer, has transformed the stage of the Gunston Arts Center's Theatre Two into a live-in painter's studio, full of canvases, brushes and paint canisters. A bed covered with a bright red Mexican textile stands near a cluttered table, and stretched out on each side wall are unfinished murals, depicting huge human shapes in Rivera's style. During the course of the show, an overalls-clad Diego (Peter Pereyra) adds a few seemingly real brushstrokes to these images. The murals are not the only signs of the production's attention to visual detail. Costumers Rosita Becker and Nucky Walder and hair/makeup stylist Lorenzo Gonzólez have done a smashing job of giving Anabel Marcano the look of Kahlo's famous self-portraits. The actress gains those thick Kahlo eyebrows and lustrous braided-up hair, and she wears vivid folk-art colors that often recall specific artworks (a long green skirt mirrors an identical item in a 1931 Kahlo painting of herself and Rivera, for instance). Designer Ayun Fedorcha's lighting primarily evokes the rich tones of Kahlo's paintings. During flashbacks and monologues, the illumination becomes harsher and bluer, and now and then -- adding a dreamlike quality -- it reveals a mysterious second studio space at the rear, behind a scrim. Compared with these burnished stage pictures, the production's content seems wan. Halac devotes a significant portion of his focus to Kahlo and Rivera's relationship with the Mexican film star María Félix (Cynthia Urrunaga), with whom Rivera had an off-again, on-again affair. The tense tete-a-tetes between the two women -- who are simultaneously attracted to and repelled by each other -- can be vaguely interesting, but too often the situation feels like a generic love triangle. While Urrunaga swans around in furs as a larger-than-life diva, Marcano and Pereyra bring a little more subtlety to their roles. Flashing spirited looks and limping resolutely (Kahlo, of course, was in a gruesome bus accident when young), Marcano emphasizes Kahlo's steely willpower without downplaying her suffering, and Pereyra's Rivera is aptly charming and full of himself. But aside from a snazzy coup de theatre at the end, the scenes unfurl so sluggishly, peppered with so many pauses, that it is hard to maintain interest. Characters take their time glaring at each other, and drinking, and talking about Trotsky (with whom Kahlo reportedly had an affair), then there's a flashback, followed by more of the same. André Breton once favorably compared Kahlo's art to "a ribbon tied around a bomb." If only that trademark explosiveness had found its way to this production.