“If I do my job as an actor, you won't notice that I'm South Asian or that I'm a woman, or even that I'm playing one of the most controversial political figures of all time. I'm portraying a person at a crossroads struggling with a difficult decision.” So says Zehra Fazal (pictured right) of her striking portrayal of Adolf Hitler in her self-produced, one-woman adaptation of Yukio Mishima’s play, My Friend Hitler, currently running at the Capital Fringe Festival.

Fazal has been in the D.C. area for nearly two years, working with companies such as The Bay Theatre, Scena Theatre, Landless, American Music Stage, and Mystery Dinner Playhouse.

The 22-year-old actor, a winner of the Wellesley College Fisk Performance Prize for Acting, spent the summer of 2004 studying with Japan’s Takarazuka Revue Company, an all-female musical theater company. She chose this play, her first solo performance, in part because of her attraction to Japanese theater. “In Japanese theater it is stylistically acceptable to transcend lines of gender and race. It's the ultimate freedom for an actor.”

Originally written as a four person show in three acts, Fazal had to make some difficult editing decisions in assembling her adaptation. “There's a lot I had to cut and edit out to make the solo show understandable. Sadly, I had to cut out a lot of the beautiful passages of text which are most representative of Mishima's style, but hopefully, that spirit is still present in the text I decided to use.” She communicated with the original translator, Hiroaki Sato, so that made the process somewhat easier.

Image courtesy of Zehra Fazal

The play examines the friendship between Adolph Hitler and the leader of the Sturm Ateilburg Army (SA), Ernst Roehm, a staunch ally of Hitler’s during his initial rise to power. It is based on the events of "The Night of Long Knives,” where Hitler ordered the execution of hundreds of SA officers, including Roehm, in order to eliminate obstacles to his becoming Fuehrer of Germany. Mishima, an advocate of traditional Japanese culture and the way of the samurai, was drawn to the subject matter because the idea of deep, lasting loyalty resonates with traditional Japanese values of loyalty to one's group over the individual self.

Fazal’s goal was to avoid caricature and tap into the pure emotion of the text. She altogether succeeds and puts forth a powerful performance in creating a character that is conflicted between his loyalty to his friend and his desire for power. Fazal’s delivery is deliberate and assured, an achievement given the text’s verbosity, while her mannerisms are entirely believable and nuanced, a result of her studying gender construction techniques in the Japanese theater. Though dressed in military garb, including the dreaded Swastika arm band, Fazal’s physical beauty could have become a distraction. One key to her performance is the decision to wear that iconic moustache, which draws a Pavlovian negative response and serves as a constant reminder of the evil behind the character on stage.

My Friend Hitler runs through July 28 at the Warehouse Arts-Next Door. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased here.