Journal-writing is a risky business. Diaries typically contain what their authors do not want to publicly express, yet once those ideas are transferred to the page, they become a revealing record that is vulnerable to anyone’s prying eyes. Let’s face it: given the opportunity, few of us would resist paging through someone’s journal, so great is the curiosity to know what makes other people tick.

Susan Sontag kept a journal most of her life. Whether or not her mediatized persona remains familiar since her death in 2004, certain of her ideas, particularly regarding the power of the image and notions of high and low culture, have filtered permanently into our social discourse. Some may remember the engaged writer who traveled to Hanoi to protest the Vietnam War or to Sarajevo to direct Beckett under the bombs, or who ardently defended Salman Rushdie in the days of the fatwa. Others may know her only through her fiction and plays, such as In America, which won the National Book Award in 2008, despite allegations of plagiarism. But few knew Sontag as she once was, before fame – and notoriety – set in, until her son, David Rieff, edited her journals for publication in 2008.

The title of those journals is Reborn, which says a lot about the Sontag that emerges from those pages, which she began in 1947, at the age of 15. The diary of a high-schooler must be the most solipsistic of confessional writing, but Sontag was no ordinary teenager: admitted to Berkeley at the age of 16, she transferred to the University of Chicago one year later to do post-grad studies. Her journal of the time relates her meeting the German writer Thomas Mann and her first experiences of San Francisco’s gay club scene, as well as her voracious appetite for reading and ideas: Gide, Anderson, Faulkner, Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Apollinaire, Pushkin, Tasso, just to name a few. Her ambitions were limitless, and her will to make herself into a fiercely brilliant thinker fill her notebooks.

Sontag: Reborn is the title of the Builders Association play devised from her journals, an artful portrait of the woman behind the intellectual, which opened this week at the New York Theater Workshop. Since running at the 2012 Under the Radar Festival, the show has undergone some rewriting to incorporate passages from the second volume of Sontag’s journals (spanning the years 1964 to 1980, published a few months after the show’s premiere). Nevertheless, the production retains at its thematic core the writer’s sexual identity, which she never openly acknowledged.

That Sontag was a lesbian long before GBLT entered the mainstream of acronymia goes a long way toward explaining her decision to hush up her relationships with the Cuban writer Maria Irene Fornes and the unnamed “H” of the journals (later, also, with the photographer Annie Liebowitz), Today, her lesbianism seems unremarkable, expect perhaps to her ex-husband, Philip Rieff, her sociology professor at the University of Chicago whom she married when she was only 18. What is fascinating is to discover the unbridled nature of Sontag’s physical passion for her lovers, which contrasts sharply with the measured, omniscient, even righteous demeanor of her mature years.

These two Sontags dialogue cleverly in the production, thanks to the Builders Association’s signature narration, which layers live performance with video and uses the medium to introduce an array of visual documents: footage of Chicago’s rail yards, maps of San Francisco, projected excerpts of Sontag’s journals, and lists upon lists of books and articles she either read or wrote herself. Moe Angelos believably portrays both women: the young Susan who is driven, even tormented, by her “most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship,” and the elder Sontag, who floats above the stage in a black and white video. The doyenne scolds and quizzes the young writer and offers an outside perspective on her youthful ambitions, by reading, for example, the cutting New York Times review of Sontag’s first novel, The Benefactor.

Angelos and director Marianne Weems tell a good story, capturing the spirited voice of the journals and reflecting it against the oracle-like presence that Sontag would become. But the nature of Sontag’s intellectual pursuits remains unclear here, and Angelos and Weems over-estimate the public’s knowledge of her career, leaving the audience to guess at the general scope and bent of her ideas, as if these were not important.

One doesn’t have to be schooled in the causes the intellectual espoused or the themes the writer explored, to enjoy Sontag: Reborn. As a study of an individual’s journey to self, it will resonate with any lover who has desired recklessly, with any woman who has struggled with career and family (long before the current “leaning in/out” conversation), and with anyone who has ever attempted to create himself through sheer force of will. It’s an exciting, even inspirational tale. But one would like to see this project expand to reveal more of how the married woman with a young son who was Harvard Radcliffe’s leading doctoral candidate at age 22 in 1955,  became one of the most influential intellectuals of the American 20th century, and a fulfilled lesbian to boot.