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Marilyn’s Menorah Set for Auction

The menorah candelabra given to Marilyn by Arthur Miller’s parents Isidore and Augusta for their wedding in 1956 will be auctioned at Kestenbaum & Co. in New York next Thursday, November 7, with a guide price of $100,000 – $150,000, CNN reports. Marilyn converted to Judaism shortly before marrying Arthur, and the menorah was still in her possession when she died in 1962, almost two years after their separation.

Originally sold at Christie’s in 1999, the menorah symbolises a lamp carried by Moses during his forty years in the wilderness, as described in the Old Testament. Marilyn’s menorah is brass-plated, with a wind-up mechanism which plays the Israeli national anthem. It was featured in a 2015 exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum. Another Judaic artefact owned by Marilyn, her siddur prayer book, was sold for $26, 000 at auction in 2018.

UPDATE: Marilyn’s menorah has been sold for $90,018.

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Marilyn at Julien’s: Home and Family

In the latest post on the November 1 event at Julien’s Auctions, Property From the Life and Career of Marilyn Monroe, let’s take at a little-known side of Marilyn, her home and family life.
(You can read all my posts on the sale here.)

“A set of two books; the first The Woman Who Was Poor by Leon Bloy, hardcover, no dust jacket, published in 1947; the second Lidice by Eleanor Wheeler, hardcover, dust jacket, published in 1957.”

SOLD for $4,375

“A receipt from Morgan Smith Jeweler located in Reno, Nevada, dated November 11, 1960, for the purchase of three Navajo rugs and a sterling silver bead necklace. Marilyn had been staying in Reno while filming The Misfits.”

SOLD for $320

A brass mechanism with a mother of pearl push button doorbell, previously wired, now not in working order; used by Marilyn in her Brentwood home which she bought in 1962.

SOLD for $3,840

“A glass coupe design champagne glass with a bulbous stem, ‘Marilyn’ is etched on the outside rim so it can be read while sipping from it; a gift to the star for her birthday from her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson.” [And sold separately, a photo of Marilyn by George Barris.]

Glass sold for $6,250; photo sold for $768

“An ornate, Italian-style, carved wood corner chair with olive green velvet upholstery; one of the star’s own chairs that was in her newly-purchased Brentwood home when Life magazine photographer Allan Grant took a number of photographs of her sitting in and on it to accompany an article written by Richard Meryman in July 1962; Monroe wore high heels that day which caused a small tear in the upholstery (which can still be seen) and she also slightly cracked the frame as she sat on top of the chair … Included are two letters: one from 1977 noting that a Joanne Raksin bought this chair directly from Inez Melson [Monroe’s business manager] and one from years later outlining how Raksin sold it to another person.”

Chair SOLD for $$81,250; photos SOLD for $768

“A three-page handwritten letter from Grace Goddard, Marilyn Monroe’s former foster mother, dated July 8, 1953. In the letter, Goddard informs Monroe that she had written to C.S. Publishing [Christian Science] on behalf of Mrs. Gladys P. Eley (Monroe’s mother, formerly Gladys Monroe Baker Mortensen) to renew her subscription for C.S. Literature. Goddard also informs Monroe that her mother is ‘improving and seems happy in her nursing.’ Goddard also states that she sent Eley a pair of white shoes along with a personal letter, which Eley received and was happy about.”

SOLD for $437.50

A standard issue United Airlines ticket for a flight the star took on March 18, 1954 from Los Angeles to San Francisco using the name ‘Mrs. Joseph DiMaggio.’

SOLD for $1,024

“A single sheet of stationery from Parkside House, the English manor where Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller stayed in Surrey while Monroe filmed The Prince and the Showgirl in London in 1956. The page contains a mournful handwritten poem in pencil on front of sheet with multiple strikethroughs and edits, reading in full, ‘Where his eyes rest with pleasure-I/ want to still be-but time has changed/ the hold of that glance./ Alas how will I cope when I am/ even less youthful-/ I seek joy but it is clothed/ with pain-/ take heart as in my youth/ sleep and rest my heavy head/ on his breast for still my love/ sleeps beside me.'”

SOLD for $6,250

“A one-page typed letter from an author’s representative by the name of Alex Jackinson dated September 7, 1957. The letter references a query Jackinson had received regarding Marilyn Monroe’s family heritage and a potentially forthcoming news article mentioning Edward Mortensen’s daughter, who was claiming to be Monroe’s half-sister. Mortensen was listed as Monroe’s father on her birth certificate; however, it is known today that Stanley C. Gifford is Monroe’s biological father. The Jackinson letter reads in part, ‘One of the unhappy aspects of agenting is that articles come along which I would rather they did not, such as the one about which I am now writing. For the story concerns you, your father(?) and half-sister (?). The enclosed query is something which I received from Graham Fisher, one of my English clients.’ The letter continues, ‘He came across the story about your alleged family from a Scandinavian source. Once the query was in my hands, I sent it to THE AMERICAN WEEKLY. They showed an interest in running the story, but expressed some doubt as to the authenticity of Mr. Mortensen being your father. At any rate, I would not be a party to the sale unless the story had your okay.’ A copy of the article is included in this lot. It reads in part, ‘Living quietly in the small military town of Holback, 30 miles from Copenhagen, is a baker’s wife whose sister is the most famous movie-star in the world. Yes Mrs. Olava Nielsen has never seen her famous sister, Marilyn Monroe, in the movies.’ The article continues, ‘Her father, Mortensen, was a Norwegian who left for the United States in 1924 to check on the prospects of immigration. His wife, however, decided against leaving her native Norway. The result – Mr. Mortensen fell in love with a follies dancer in the states … and Marilyn Monroe was born. When the scandal leaked back to Norway, his wife and family found life embarrassingly difficult and moved to Denmark.’ Interestingly, Monroe s birth certificate reads ‘Mortenson’ while the article reads ‘Mortensen.’ The word ‘Answered’ is handwritten in pencil on the original letter from Jackinson.” 

SOLD for $750

“A pair of letters from the North American Newspaper Alliance regarding Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller’s requested appearance at the organization’s annual cocktail party. The first letter, dated March 26, 1958, reads in part, ‘Since your husband and you have been nice enough to come other years, we would like it very much to have you – and will miss you if you cannot make it.’ The second letter, dated July 2, 1958, sent to Lois Weber, Monroe’s publicist, reads in part, ‘Tell her we were disappointed that she could not attend the annual cocktail party, but I don’t blame her because I think cocktail parties are a pain in the neck, anyway, and she has been very patient in the past.’ Both letters are signed by John N. Wheeler.”

SOLD for $192

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Atlanta Celebrates the Jewish Marilyn

Bob Bahr explores Marilyn’s spiritual side in a cover story for the Atlanta Jewish Times (dated August 30.)

“Monroe once told Paula Strasberg, her drama coach at the time, that she felt a special kinship with her newfound faith. ‘I can identify with the Jews,’ she said. ‘Everybody’s out to get them, no matter what they do, like me.’

On the front door of the home where she died, she had affixed a mezuzah with its tiny parchment scroll of sacred Jewish writings. She still had the prayer book with her personal notes written in its pages, a gift from Miller that had once belonged to the Brooklyn synagogue where he had had his bar mitzvah. On her mantle she kept a bronze menorah, which played ‘Hatikvah,’ the national anthem of the State of Israel. It was a present from Miller’s Yiddish-speaking mother.

Rabbi Robert Goldburg had worked with her during her conversion and provided her with a number of Jewish historical and religious works to study. About three weeks after her death, he wrote of his impressions of her at the time.

‘She was aware of the great character that the Jewish people had produced. … She was impressed by the rationalism of Judaism — its ethical and prophetic ideals and its close family life.’

When she rebelled against the exploitation of the Hollywood studio system, broke her contract with 20th Century Fox and fled Hollywood in 1954 for a new life in New York, it was at the urging of Milton Greene, a popular Jewish photographer with whom she founded Marilyn Monroe Productions. For a while she lived with Greene and his wife and helped take care of their year-old son.

Even before the move she lived and worked in what was largely a Jewish world. In Hollywood her agent and publicist and an early drama coach and mentor were all Jewish. She owed her early success, in part, to personal relationships with the powerful Jewish studio executive Joseph Schenck and the important talent agent Johnny Hyde, who had originally emigrated from the Jewish Ukraine. Her three psychiatrists were Jewish as well as many of her doctors. One of her closest journalistic confidants was the newspaper columnist Sidney Skolsky.

But all that accelerated when she moved to New York and enrolled in Lee and Paula Strasberg’s Actors Studio … She quickly fell in with their circle of friends, who made up the theatrical and literary elite of Jewish New York. She volunteered to be the star attraction at a United Jewish Appeal dinner.

The poet Norman Rosten and his wife and children were close friends. She was a regular at a summer of brunches and picnics and cookouts with the Strasbergs in Ocean Beach on Fire Island. She frequently dug into what Paula Strasberg called her ‘Jewish icebox’ there, with its salamis from Zabar’s on New York’s Upper West Side and the honey cakes and fancy European pastries from some of the bakeries started in New York by refugees from Nazi persecution.

It was, in the words of one Monroe biographer, ‘a year of joy,’ made even more joyful by a newfound romance with [Arthur] Miller … Gloria Steinem, the Jewish American essayist and feminist, wrote a perceptive analysis about the relationship and Monroe’s decision just before their marriage to convert to Judaism.

‘Miller himself was not religious, but she wanted to be part of his family’s tradition.”‘I’ll cook noodles like your mother,” she told him on their wedding day. She was optimistic this marriage would work. On the back of a wedding photograph, she wrote “Hope, Hope, Hope.”‘

Her public commitment to Judaism in the mid-50s was just one of the signs that Jews were winning new acceptance in America after the end of World War II and of the changes that the war had brought.

Although she’s been gone these many years, she is not forgotten. Time has treated the memory of Monroe with kindness. Her estate, most of which she left to the Strasberg family, has consistently earned tens of millions of dollars over the more than 50 years since her death … As for that prayer book that Arthur Miller took from his Brooklyn synagogue and Monroe kept to her dying day, it sold at auction last year for $18,000.”

Thanks to Marco at Marilyn Remembered

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Brody, Cannavale Join Cast of ‘Blonde’

Adrien Brody (left) will play Arthur Miller; while Bobby Cannavale (right) has been cast as Joe DiMaggio in the upcoming biopic, Blonde

Adrian Brody, who won an Oscar for The Pianist back in 2002, will play Arthur Miller in Andrew Domink’s Netflix adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde, as Garth Franklin reports for Dark Horizons. Brody has also appeared in The Grand Budapest Hotel and TV’s Peaky Blinders. Meanwhile, Bobby Cannavale – who won an Emmy for TV’s Boardwalk Empire, and has also acted in films such as Blue Jasmine and I, Tonya, will play Joe DiMaggio. With Ana de Armas set to play Marilyn, we’re sure to hear of more casting decisions soon (and incidentally, Ana posted this tribute to Marilyn on Instagram earlier this month, marking the 57th anniversary of her death.)

UPDATE: Ana was recently spotted on the set of Blonde.
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Marilyn and Arthur’s Crossed Destinies

This week marks 63 years since Marilyn married Arthur Miller, and the newlyweds (as photographed by Jack Cardiff a few weeks later) Grace the cover of Le Nouveau Magazine Litteraire‘s summer double-issue (#19), as part of a feature on ‘Literary Couples and Crossed Destinies’, with a short profile inside by Philippe Labro. The magazine is now available from the Newsstand website for £7.78.

Thanks to Eric Patry and Fraser Penney

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Manfred Kreiner’s Widow Remembers Marilyn

Manfred Kreiner visits Marilyn on the Misfits set, 1960

An archive of material by the German photographer Manfred ‘Linus’ Kreiner was recently sold at Julien’s Auctions, including many images of Marilyn. His widow Sally Kreiner (Manfred died in 2005, aged 78) has shared her memories of Marilyn with Stephanie Nolasco for Fox News.

“‘[My husband] met Marilyn through a friend who turned out to be her publicist for [1959’s] Some Like it Hot,’ Sally told Fox News about the encounter. ‘This publicist told him one day, “How would you like to photograph Marilyn Monroe?” My husband said, “Of course I would love to.” And that’s how it all started.’

The German native soon found himself in Chicago face to face with Monroe. And she was far from a Hollywood diva.

‘He thought she was really lovely,’ said Sally. ‘He really liked her. He was a little bit nervous about shooting her because she was just so famous. And he was really delighted to become part of her entourage and photograph her. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity and he was really happy to tag along.’

As for Sally, she decided to stay behind.

‘No I certainly didn’t tag along,’ Sally chuckled. ‘I would have been more of a hindrance … She was really happy with [then-husband] Arthur Miller. She was just in awe of him. Arthur was an intellectual and she was not. And for the same reasons, he saw something in her, obviously.’

However, when it came to anyone capturing Monroe’s image, the actress had one request. ‘She had the right to select the photos he could print and the ones he could not,’ said Sally. ‘She had a final say when it came to her pictures. And it worked out because she selected the ones he wanted to print of her. There was no argument there.’

While Kreiner went on to pursue a thriving career, Monroe would be plagued with tragedy … Sally said Kreiner was heartbroken by the news [of Marilyn’s death.]

‘He said it was too bad something like this happened to her,’ said Sally. ‘Even at that time, there were a lot of rumors and questions. He certainly didn’t have an answer for it. And I don’t know if anyone ever really did get an answer for what happened to her and why … She became such a celebrity overnight. And that just became so much bigger than her.’

‘But despite everything that was said about her, she did have a certain quality, a remarkable quality,’ continued Sally. ‘You just see her and you wish you could have known her. She’s ethereal, but earthy too. And she possessed a certain charm, an American charm. You think of all the celebrities in Hollywood today, how many of them have exactly what she had. I don’t think people can ever really totally figure out her magic. She’s still mystical.’

‘What you see is what my husband saw in her,’ she said. ‘He really didn’t see her as a sex symbol. He saw her as a lovely person with a great smile.'”

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Marilyn at the Chateau Marmont

Shawn Levy is the author of several books about the entertainment in the 1950s and ’60s, including Rat Pack Confidential, which became a bestseller on its release twenty years ago. Marilyn’s association with the Rat Pack was covered in this entertaining book, but Levy’s style is gossipy and speculative.

In his latest tome, The Castle On Sunset, Levy explores the history of one of Hollywood’s most fabled hotels, the Chateau Marmont. Levy isn’t the first author to tackle the subject; Raymond Sarlot and Fred E. Basten beat him to it with Life At the Marmont back in 1987.

Marilyn stayed there while filming Bus Stop in 1956, although her official residence was a rented house in Beverly Glen. She most likely used Paula Strasberg’s suite for convenience, not to mention her secret trysts with Arthur Miller, who was waiting out his divorce in Nevada. (Miller’s legal battle with the House Un-American Activities Committee was hotting up at the time, and rather disturbingly, the FBI tracked the couple to the hotel.)

Levy also mentions that journalist Brad Darrach interviewed Marilyn there for her Time magazine cover story. This may seem a little odd, as the article’s author was Ezra Goodman. However, Darrach was apparently part of a team which assembled the piece. He first shared his memories with Anthony Summers for Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe in 1984. Here’s the original account, as related by Summers…

“When Time magazine mounted its first cover story on Marilyn, during the shooting of Bus Stop, its researchers began uncovering a good deal about Marilyn’s parentage. This was a vulnerable area because of her various deceptions. As a result, one of Time‘s youngest reporters, Brad Darrach, was granted a personal interview, in bizarre circumstances.

Darrach collected Marilyn at Fox at 11:00 A.M., and drove her to her hotel, the Chateau Marmont. Marilyn, herself a fast driver, asked the reporter to drive slowly. She seemed to him to be afraid, not of his driving, but ‘generally frightened.’ Once in her suite Marilyn soon declared she was tired, and asked if they could do the interview in her bedroom.

So it was that Darrach ended up, he laughingly remembered, ‘spending ten hours in bed with Marilyn Monroe’. She lay down with her head at one end of the bed. He settled at the foot, and there they talked until long after dark.

‘She was Marilyn, and reasonably pretty,’ Darrach remembered. ‘And of course there were those extraordinary jutting breasts and jutting behind. I’ve never seen a behind like hers; it was really remarkable, it was a very subtly composed ass. Yet I never felt for a moment any sexual temptation. There was nothing about her skin that made me want to touch it. She looked strained and a little unhealthy, as though there was some nervous inner heat that dried the skin. But there was no sexual feeling emanating from her. I am sure that was something that she put on for the camera.'”

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‘Norma Jeane Baker Of Troy’ Reviewed

Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, the new short play by Anne Carson, opens at The Shed in Hudson Yards, New York, tonight. However, with decidedly mixed reviews and reported walkouts at a preview over the weekend, the show is off to a rocky start. In his review for Bloomberg, James Tarmy admits it is “not for everyone.” (I’d be interested to hear what a Monroe fan thinks of it …)

“Neither [Ben] Whishaw nor [Renee] Fleming portrays the title character in this equally hypnotic and exasperating production. Or not exactly. When first seen, on a snowy New Year’s Eve in the early 1960s, their characters appear to be a rather anxious businessman (Mr. Whishaw) and the thoroughly professional stenographer (Ms. Fleming) he has recruited to help him work, after hours, on a special project.

That would be the very script of the show we’re watching, which is indeed about Norma Jeane Baker. If you don’t know that Norma Jeane was Monroe’s birth name, I wish you much luck in following this show. Because that’s only the first — and by far the simplest — of the identities attached to Monroe in Ms. Carson’s investigation of the illusion and substance of feminine beauty in a testosterone-fueled world of war.

Helen is Norma Jeane, while her ostensibly cuckolded husband, Menelaus is transformed into Arthur, King of Sparta and New York (referring to Monroe’s third husband, the playwright Arthur Miller).

Norma Jeane is further conflated with another abductee from Greek mythology, Persephone, especially as she was conjured by the 20th-century British poet Stevie Smith. All these variations on the theme of beautiful women held captive by men echo a phrase that is both spoken and sung throughout this production: ‘It’s a disaster to be a girl.’

Now why, you may well ask, is this a tale to be told by a man? Ms. Carson has said that she wrote this monologue with Mr. Whishaw in mind … His ability to cross the gender divide without coyness or caricature turns out to be an invaluable asset in Norma Jeane.

Mr. Whishaw and Ms. Fleming are, against the odds, marvelous. They somehow lend an emotional spontaneity to ritualistic words and gestures, while conjuring an affecting relationship … As might be expected, Ms. Fleming brings a luxuriant, caressing tone to the song fragments … And though it’s a man who narrates — and tries to make sense of — Norma Jeane’s story, it is fittingly a woman’s voice that supplies the aural oxygen in which it unfolds.

You don’t really you need to know your classics or even your Hollywood lore to grasp the thematic gist of Norma Jeane, which ponders the follies of war-making men and their abuses of women. Sometimes Ms. Carson’s conjunctions of figures past and present can seem too both obvious and too obscure. The show’s surprisingly predictable conclusion lacks the haunting resonance it aspires to.” – Ben Brantley, New York Times

“It is a play formed, we learn in the program, through Euripedes’ Helen, which recast the story of ‘legendarily the harlot of Troy and destroyer of two civilizations’ from her point of view, and her sorrow. In the program, #MeToo and that exhaustingly overused phrase ‘fake news’ are both invoked, as well as Carson’s intention to ‘let dark realities materialize dimly’ in particular sections of the play.

Well, Norma Jeane Baker of Troy can claim success on that score at least. The set, far too far away from the audience, feels like a retreating photograph. On it, you had two otherwise-wonderful performers, Whishaw and Fleming, playing within what first looks like the office of a gumshoe.

It’s New Year’s Eve, turning to New Year’s Day, 1963, with fireworks booming outside like bombs. Whishaw’s character has a mood board of sorts, and—it turns out—is not a detective, but a screenwriter working on a film project that is a meditation on both Marilyn Monroe (who died the previous year) and Helen of Troy.

The script drifts, utterly unmoored, between the two, their lives, ambitions, beliefs, and the men, dramas, and in Helen’s case war. Misogyny, ambition, and marriage pulse as themes.

As the play progresses, Whishaw, darting here and there, gradually changes into Monroe—via breast and buttock padding, make up and a wig—until finally putting on a dress that recalls the famous flowing white dress Monroe wore in The Seven Year Itch. As Monroe, we hear of the actress’ private pain; there are pills, a champagne bottle that stubbornly refused to pop open (how symbolic that seemed on Saturday night), and then death.” – Tim Teenan, Daily Beast

“Ben Whishaw plays Marilyn/Norma Jeane, or rather he plays a young man in suit and tie (costumes by Sussie Juhlin-Wallen) who dictates a modern update of the Euripides play to a stenographer (Renee Fleming) on New Year’s Eve, 1963. The two of them sit at desks in a very film noir office (set by Alex Eales, the minimal lighting by Anthony Doran) before Whishaw begins to dress up like Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, complete with her signature white halter-top dress and ukulele. Ukulele? Maybe Whishaw’s drag persona borrows it from Sugar in Some Like It Hot, but then, inconsistency is Carson’s trademark.

Whishaw’s young man first mentions Marilyn in her preproduction days on Clash by Night where MGM is helping to wage the battle of Troy — even though RKO released Fritz Lang’s 1952 classic.

Whishaw often dictates that Marilyn ‘enter as Truman Capote’ before imitating that writer’s high-pitched voice. This Marilyn also has a young daughter, Hermione, which is also the name of Helen’s long-lost daughter. Marilyn’s Hermione lives in New York City, and occasionally Pearl Bailey makes an appearance there.

Carson plays slow and loose with the Monroe legend, and in press materials, she connects her subject to the #MeToo movement. #WhatAgain? is more like it.” – Robert Hofler, The Wrap

“Carson’s interest in a multitude of genres and in mixing registers is on full display in Norma Jeane. Many of Whishaw’s lines, like “She’s just a bit of grit caught in the world’s need for transcendence,” are gorgeous and heightened, like poetry; the references tossed around range from Persephone to Pearl Bailey; the set is naturalistic, but the action happening on it is mythic and strange. We’re ostensibly watching two people write a play within a play about Marilyn Monroe, but they’re also investigating the Trojan War, and (in Fleming’s case) delivering operatic sung-monologues about rape and Greek tragedy, and (in Whishaw’s case) getting into full, Seven Year Itch Marilyn drag. It’s about gender and pain and war and mythmaking—all interesting, but wordy and not easy to follow. If my attention wandered off at any point, at least the Griffin’s beautiful raised stage and sleek all-black look gave me plenty to appreciate.” – Amanda Feinman, Bedford + Bowery

“Carson entwines the stories of Norma Jeane—the sweet-faced pinup girl who would one day be recast by Hollywood, then by life, as Marilyn Monroe—and Euripides’s Helen … Here Norma Jeane tells the story of how her husband Arthur, king of Sparta and New York, invaded Troy reportedly to rescue her while she, safely stowed at Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont, is reduced to ‘box office poison.’

For ninety minutes, Fleming and Wishaw—a luminous duo if ever there was one—did their best to make things interesting, but the scenario they were given was oppressively thin. The always marvelous Wishaw spoke as Fleming typed along, recording him, singing passages to him, with him, less amanuensis than an alighted angel, a tender force. As the Steno paper spilled across the desk and piled up on the floor, Wishaw gradually swapped his suit for a girdle, a bra and some padding, a platinum wig, and a white halter dress, becoming ‘Marilyn Monroe’ (a drag, it must be noted, first worn by Norma Jeane).

This production of Norma Jeane woefully never transcended the appearance of an exercise, never bloomed into a total work, in large part because it backed away from devising compelling and imaginative solutions to the challenges Carson poses: how to revise a famous tale to reveal the false truths that shape and warp women and men; how to pave space for possible collisions between stage and screen; how to tickle and tug at the thin membranes that separate person from persona, performer from icon.”

Jennifer Krasinski, Artforum

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‘Finding Marilyn’: A Glimpse Inside the Strasberg Home

Scott Fortner of the Marilyn Monroe Collection blog has detailed his visit to the home of Anna Strasberg, widow of Actors Studio founder Lee Strasberg and heir to Marilyn’s estate, in a 3-part article, ‘Finding Marilyn Monroe.’ Among his many fascinating discoveries, Scott reveals that pictures of Marilyn still adorn the Strasberg family home;  Lee was unaware that he would be the main beneficiary in her will; and that Marilyn had admired her future husband, Arthur Miller, since the late 1940s. It’s essential reading for all fans of MM.

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‘After The Fall’ in Buffalo

Arthur Miller’s controversial 1964 play, After The Fall, is being staged in the Manny Fried Playhouse through to April 6, as Anthony Chase reports for Buffalo News.

“Many people will have a vague awareness that this is the play in which Miller exorcises his feelings about his marriage to actress Marilyn Monroe. For Post-Industrial Productions, a newcomer on the Buffalo theater scene, taking on this notoriously challenging script, albeit in co-production with Subversive Theatre Collective, is a bold gesture.

The central character, a successful lawyer named Quentin, clearly stands in for the playwright.  He enters talking and seldom stops … In time you might begin to wish that he would quit his whining. And then again, the whining of Miller is endlessly intelligent and nuanced. My recommendation is to settle in and indulge in the luxury of such an overabundance of Arthur Miller.

[Darryl] Hart maintains Quentin’s likability, which is tempered by his cluelessness over why his contrasting wives ultimately come to the same negative assessment of him … Bethany Burrows doesn’t waste a single moment of the delicious role of wife Number Two, ‘Maggie.’ This is the unflattering portrait of Marilyn Monroe, who is both self-absorbed and lacking in self-esteem. Among the several plot threads, the Maggie plot is the most engaging and haunting.”