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‘Finishing the Picture’ Opens in London

Arthur Miller’s last play, Finishing the Picture, has opened at London’s Finborough Theatre to mostly positive reviews – although some critics have questioned why Kitty (the Marilyn-based character) is so constantly talked about, but never actually seen. Only the second production (and first in Europe), it’s on until July 7.

“The play itself is a pretty static thing, involving much talking in circles as to how to coax the radiantly beautiful and gifted Kitty (Monroe) out of her crippling self doubt and drug dependency in order to complete filming and save her from herself. Crucially, Kitty never appears on stage and has no voice, rendering her the kind of unknowable goddess/tormentor … indeed the whole piece has the feel of an exercise to seek ‘closure’ for this chapter of his life.” – The Stage

“The cohesive group of actors deliver strong performances from start to finish … A jarring peek into the ugly truth behind the idealisation of film stars opposed to the reality of the profession, Miller’s final play becomes of momentous meaning in the aftermath of the Weinstein scandal.” – Broadway World

“Even as all the production members attempt to cajole Kitty into emerging from her hotel room and returning to set, there is a sense that their supposed concern for her is secondary: they will say whatever they must to save the picture … the ensemble do not seem to appreciate their culpability in the downfall of women like Monroe, and even by the play’s conclusion there is a sense that, even as Kitty has a slight chance of recovery, it may only be temporary.” – Reviews Hub

“It’s an interesting decision Miller made not to give Kitty herself a voice, but to show how those around her project on to this blank screen their own preoccupations and prejudices. The trouble is, we end up with very little idea of why Kitty is having a breakdown. In his programme note, director Phil Willmott alludes to the Weinstein scandal and #MeToo movement, but sexual abuse of women in Hollywood doesn’t really feature in the play — even if it is implied that Kitty is regarded as a commodity.” – Londonist,

“Finishing the Picture feels like an exorcism, a celebration, an apology and an inquest – it’s a patchy but powerful look at the dark forces that made Monroe such a vital but troubled personality … Miller has elected to keep Kitty entirely off-stage. It’s a clever device, which emphasises Kitty’s loneliness, but it sucks the life out of the play. Everything is reported, precious little happens and the most interesting character doesn’t get a look in.” – The Guardian

“Forty years on from his After the Fall, [Miller] returned to trying to explain – not excuse, not quite – the disintegration of his relationship with Monroe, alias Kitty. Here, he reserves his full venom for Method acting gurus Lee and Paula Strasberg … Yet Miller the playwright’s concern for Monroe seems as effortful as that of Paul, the Miller character. The biggest surprise, puzzle and disappointment is that, for someone so evidently haunted by the memory, Miller can in the end (literally, for him, the end) offer so little unique insight.” – Financial Times

“This is a tribute play. Miller had true affection for Monroe and with Finishing The Picture, this is clearly on show. An incredible look at the power of  and the absurdity of unchecked ego. Phil Willmott’s skilful direction expertly bringing this passionate play to life.” – Boyz

“The history is fascinating (for a while at least), but the play less so. It is hampered by the fact that Kitty is always off stage. Instead we get snippets from lives of less importance … you can feel the claustrophobia here of being stuck in a hotel in the middle of nowhere. But I soon got bored with the seesaw drama of Kitty’s ability to stand up.” – The Times 

“The intimate setting of the Finborough Theatre provides a perfect foreground for Miller’s innermost thinking to unpack. Herein, the audience are given a rare glimpse into the dark imperfections of Monroe’s character and how those in her orbit, superbly brought to life by the performing ensemble, struggle to pacify her mercurial tendencies.” – KCW Today 

“Like many old men’s plays (think of Shakespeare’s The Tempest or Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken), it is spare and static. But it is admirably animated by director Phil Willmott with a skilful use of music and sound effects to represent the unseen Kitty.” – Daily Express

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Miller (and Marilyn) Haunting the Stage

This month sees three plays looking at Arthur Miller’s legacy reaching the stage. Firstly, Jack Canfora’s new play, Fellow Travelers – looking at Miller, Marilyn and Elia Kazan, set against the backdrop of the red-baiting era – is at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, NY, until June 17, with Rachel Spencer Hewitt playing MM. Over in London, Miller’s last play, Finishing the Picture – about the filming of The Misfits – will have its European premiere at the Finborough Theatre from June 12-July 7.

Finally, Bernard Weinraub’s Fall – now at the Calderwood Pavilion in Boston – looks at Arthur’s conflicted attitude towards Daniel, his son with Inge Morath, who grew up in institutions after being diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome. While Arthur was a public figure, Daniel (who is still alive) is not, and it all seems in questionable taste to me.

“Miller, not having recorded his thoughts about his son, cannot defend himself here,” Jesse Green writes in the New York Times. “I’m not sure Mr. Weinraub would let him anyway. He seems to want to take Miller down, and not just as a man who made an abominable choice like thousands of other parents in his day.”

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‘Finishing the Picture’ in London

Arthur Miller’s last play, Finishing the Picture, looks back to the filming of The Misfits and although Marilyn (depicted as ‘Kitty’) is seldom seen, she is the force that binds together the other characters (based on Miller, the Strasbergs, Huston etc.)

From June 12-July 7, Finishing the Picture will have its European premiere at the Finborough Theatre, above the Finborough Arms pub in Earl’s Court, London. More details will follow – but for now, read my review of the play here.

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Rewriting History: Marilyn, Arthur and #MeToo

In the wake of last year’s revelations about sexual abuse in Hollywood, Marilyn’s own experiences have often been cited as historical precedent. While she certainly did experience sexual harassment, it’s notable that she managed to succeed without recourse to the fabled ‘casting couch.’ She resisted Harry Cohn’s advances; was a friend but not a mistress to Joe Schenck; and her relationship with Johnny Hyde was based on real affection. As for Darryl F. Zanuck – perhaps the most significant Hollywood figure in her career – they were never close, and Zanuck himself admitted that Marilyn’s triumphs were of her own creation.

In a new article for the Daily Beast, Maria Dahvana Headley turns her attention to Arthur Miller, claiming that he ‘smeared’ Marilyn and ‘invented the myth of the male witch hunt.’ She begins with his 1952 play, The Crucible, based on the Salem witch trials of 1692, but widely perceived as an allegory for the contemporary ‘red-baiting’ crusade by the House Un-American Activities Committee, in which Arthur would later be implicated – but ultimately exonerated.

Arthur and Marilyn first met in 1951, when he was still married. There was a strong attraction between them, and they corresponded intermittently thereafter. Headley is not the first to argue that the adulterous affair between the teenage Abigail Williams and John Proctor might have been inspired by his conflicted feelings for Marilyn – Barbara Leaming also suggested this in her 1999 biography, Marilyn Monroe. Many historians have pointed out that Miller’s depiction of these protagonists is not accurate – Abigail was still a child, and there was no affair with Proctor. This mooted association between Abigail and Marilyn is purely speculative, however, and Miller would hardly be the first playwright to fictionalise events. (For a factual account of the trials, I can recommend Stacy Schiff’s The Witches.)

But Headley goes further still, conflating the story of Arthur rubbing Marilyn’s feet at a Hollywood party (as later told by Marilyn to her acting coach, Natasha Lytess) with an incident noted in the Salem court reports that inspired The Crucible, of Abigail touching Proctor’s hood and then becoming hysterical, crying out that her hands were burning. ‘Women, unless they are very devout and very old, The Crucible tells us, are unreliable and changeable,’ Headley writes. ‘They’re jealous. They’re vengeful. They’re confused about sex and about love. They might, given very little provocation, ruin the life of a good man, and everything else in the world too.’

Headley is on firmer ground with her interpretation of After the Fall, Miller’s 1964 play which featured a self-destructive singer, Maggie, who marries lawyer Quentin – a relationship widely acknowledged to be based on Arthur’s marriage to Marilyn (though he seemingly remained in denial.) ‘Maggie uses sex to bewitch Quentin out of his marriage to the long-suffering Louise,’ Headley writes, ‘marries him herself, and then becomes a catastrophe. By the end of the play, Quentin is wrestling a bottle of pills out of her hand. She drains their bank accounts, uses all of his energy for her own career, and demands endless love.’

This is a harsh portrayal of Marilyn, and many felt that Miller went too far. However, it is not without compassion. By focusing on the real-life parallels, Headley sidelines the broader themes of both plays. The Crucible was about the persecution of innocents for imaginary crimes, and After the Fall was, at least partly, a reckoning with the Holocaust (as well as Arthur’s own guilt over Marilyn’s death.) While the victims of the Salem witch hunts were mostly women, it is not surprising that Miller would identify more closely with a male protagonist. And the horrors of his own time – the holocaust, and HUAC – claimed both men and women.

In his final work, Finishing the Picture, Arthur revisited the troubled production of The Misfits. ‘She’s ceased to be the sex goddess she’s supposed to be,’ Headley says of Kitty, the Marilyn-figure in the play. ‘Instead, she is once again a naked girl in the woods, glimpsed running from the rest of the story, and in her flight, she makes everyone around her miserable … In Miller’s final statement on the matter, she’s what the world might become if a woman wanted too much consideration.’

In November 2017, Anna Graham Hunter accused actor Dustin Hoffman of sexually harassing her as a 17 year-old intern on the set of Death of a Salesman, the 1985 TV adaptation of Miller’s most famous play. According to the Hollywood Reporter, film director Volker Schlondorff responded with the glib remark that ‘I wish Arthur Miller was around, he would find the right words, but then he might get accused of sexually molesting Marilyn Monroe.’ Since then, other women have come forward with allegations against Hoffman. Whatever Schlondorff may believe, it’s impossible to know what Arthur would have made of the scandal, but it’s worth remembering that he reportedly disliked Hoffman’s performance in the prior stage production, although it had won a Tony award for Best Revival.

Anna Graham Hunter’s story needs to be heard, as do countless other victims of predatory men. In Marilyn’s case, however, there’s a danger of rewriting history. While Headley’s literary critique is valid and interesting, her attempt to recast Miller as an abuser of women is grossly unfair.

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Tony Kushner on Miller, Marilyn and ‘The Misfits’

The Library of America has included Finishing the Picture, Arthur Miller’s last play about filming The Misfits, in a new anthology, Collected Plays 1987-2004, edited by playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America.) It was previously published in England and France, but this is its first US publication. You can read my review of Finishing the Picture here.

Kushner has spoken to the Daily Beast about his work with Miller.

“The new volume of the Arthur Miller collection is the first U.S. publication of Finishing the Picture, which Miller wrote shortly before he died in 2005. What’s that play about?

It’s about Marilyn Monroe’s struggles with depression and drugs and various other interferences during the making of a film, and it’s about the collapse of his marriage to Monroe. It’s kind of a surprising thing. For a very long time, he was famously close-mouthed about his marriage to Monroe and her problems, and right at the end of his life he decided to write this play about it.

Is it sort of a biography of his Marilyn years?

I never actually asked him about it, but he was getting old and I think knew other people were going to write about his life and wanted to do his own dramatic account.”

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Marilyn/MISFITS/Miller

Marilyn/MISFITS/Miller, a new play by Rich Rubin, is currently playing at the CoHo Theatre in Portland, Oregon.

“Rubin’s frequently witty script crackles with delicious dialogue and smart touches from the very beginning (opening line: ‘Blackout. End of play.’). But it’s burdened by a confusing array of characters (34 roles played by seven actors, including cameo appearances by other notables of the era), a frame narrative (a 2004 production in progress of Miller’s last play, Finishing the Picture, which is a barely fictionalized version of, yes, the filming of The Misfits) and a pointless concluding dash of meta-theater, with an actor playing Rubin himself taking the stage for the obligatory end of show ‘what happened to them all?’
 
With so many levels—a play about the production of a play about the production of a movie about a cast of misfits—and so much going on, it’s a wonder (and a tribute to Rubin and director Karen Alexander-Brown) that M/M/M makes as much sense as it does…We never get a clear answer to a crucial question: what do the playwright (and Miller) think of Monroe?” – Brett Campbell, Williamette Week
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Arthur Miller: Beyond Marilyn’s Shadow

Rebecca Miller, daughter of Arthur, is a writer, director, and actress. She was born a month after Marilyn’s death, to Arthur and his third wife, Inge Morath.

Rebecca spoke to the New York Post recently about the way some of her father’s plays are overshadowed by the memory of Marilyn.

“As for After the Fall and Finishing the Picture — Miller’s two plays about his second wife, Marilyn Monroe — Rebecca remains wary.

‘Anything that’s got the shadow of Marilyn in it — even something that has just a slight taste of her — gets overshadowed by her,’ she says.

Finishing the Picture, Miller’s final play, is about the making of Monroe’s last movie, The Misfits, for which he wrote the screenplay. There has been just one production, at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in 2004.

It’s a fascinating story with some terrific parts for larger-than-life stage actors. ‘But I’m holding back on it,’ says Rebecca. ‘I’m guarding it. Sometimes it’s good to hold.’

She calls After the Fall, which Miller wrote in 1963, shortly after Monroe died, ‘a wonderful play that unfortunately in his time got completely read as an autobiographical work about her. You can’t pretend she’s not there, but at the same time it is about other things. There are meditations on the Holocaust and how we all have murder inside us.’

Rebecca says she’d like to see a production that ‘skews the play’ away from the Monroe character.

Which probably means a production with a major star in the male lead.

‘If the right person comes along, I’d certainly consider it,’ she says. ‘But nobody’s asking to do it.’

Now that’s a challenge a great actor — Kevin Spacey, perhaps? — should pick up.”