“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