"Imagine a play so well conceived, staged, and performed, you'd ask to see it again as soon as the curtain call ends. Now consider a historical personality so much larger than life that to fully flesh her out requires two performers. That's Leni, Strawberry Theatre Workshop's thought-provoking tour through the world of Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl." ––Kevin Phinney 7/23/2008 "The skills of these actors bring all of Greenman's rich ambiguity to the surface... [Amy] Thone faces off [Alexandra] Tavares with a cavernous glare and steel defenses, alternately bullying and imploring her other self to accept the elder's often thin explanations. Tavares reveals an artful and ambitious young woman whose moral judgment is short-circuited by a dazzling proximity to power... I loved every conflicted moment." ––Gianni Truzzi 7/23/2008 "Hell hath no fury like a genius scorned—Leni evokes the fury brilliantly, but doesn't parse the scorn... Sarah Greenman wrote Leni as a conversation between the clever, naive Leni the Younger and the steely, wry Leni the Elder. They discuss, argue about, and reenact scenes from their life for hidden cameras, which project onto screens leaning on the stage. Together, Thone and Tavares are a Janus-faced marvel—their acting crisp and muscular, their relationship charged and wary." ––Brendan Kiley 7/15/2008 "The 'orders' Riefenstahl followed, as Sarah Greenman's play Leni sharply argues, were those of an ambitious artist, whose cultural myopia is stunning. A debate between Riefenstahl's flinty, evasive older self (played by the riveting Amy Thone) and her girlish, seductive younger self (Alexandra Tavares), Leni is an intelligent brief on artistic responsibility, influence and narcissism." ––Misha Berson 7/21/2008 "In a wonderfully accurate set by Greg Carter, wearing great pseudo-period costumes by Heidi Ganser, actresses Amy Thone and Alexandra Tavares take turns with the story, using a film script that each appears to have memorized... Thone and Tavares are kind of magical. They are both commanding figures, yet they are in service to the film they are making." ––Miryam Gordon 7/18/2008 "Tavares is skittishly seductive talking with Adolf, self-involved, checking on how much rope she can get. Thone is imperial, self-mythologizing, on the lookout for the light that falls on her good side. The two are directed by Rhonda J Soikowski, who gives this odd couple a lived-in emotional backdrop that keeps the split-personality artifice from getting too cleverly 'meta' for dramatic good." ––Michael van Baker 7/16/2008 "Thone in particular as the older, embattled Leni exerts the kind of masterful control over the material that one could easily imagine the director herself wielding. This is a Leni supremely in her element:everything she does, every action and word carefully filtered through her impeccable compositional eye. Beginning with a battle-worn stoicism, nuanced by a wry and self-deprecating sense of humor, Thone slowly allows the layers of ego to slip away, dropping each piece of her emotional armor with the languid fluidity of a strip-tease artist, until she stands exposed as a lonely, nearly forgotten, and most assuredly unappreciated former-genius, bitterly chaffing against the yoke she believes history has unfairly placed around her neck. It is quite simply a riveting performance from start to finish." ––Chris Comte 7/22/2008