On the nervous, much-photographed movie set of “The Misfits,” Henri Cartier-Bresson took a picture of Arthur Miller scrunched in a director’s chair. In the picture, just behind the writer, Miller’s then-wife Marilyn Monroe is receiving advice from her acting coach, a small woman in a huge bell-shaped hat, named Paula Strasberg. She was married to Lee Strasberg, founder of the Actors Studio and inspiration (or Svengali) to a post-war generation of American actors, Monroe most starry among them.
The quarter-smile on Miller’s face suggests a man wondering if there might be a play in what he’s hearing. It is the image of a writer storing a few nuts away for winter.
Forty-four years later, Miller — who this month turns 89 — has unveiled “Finishing the Picture,” a static memory play, though not without its moments of electricity.
It really is three competing plays, all on stage at the same time at the Goodman Theatre, coexisting uneasily within the same frame. One is a roman a clef about the mess behind the making of “The Misfits.” Miller has downplayed this, as he did 40 years ago with “After the Fall,” his previous Monroe-haunted work.
The second play attempts to get past the obvious real-life parallels and deal with larger issues: The mystique of stardom; the matter of being born lucky versus not, which harkens back to Miller’s first Broadway effort, “The Man Who Had All the Luck”; and, in line with the writer’s lifelong theme, the question of where one person’s responsibility to another begins and ends.
Then there’s the third play, the one that works. This one starts nearly an hour into the draggy first act of “Finishing the Picture.” It’s about the Strasbergs, here disguised as the Fassingers. In director Robert Falls’ production, Stephen Lang plays Jerome Fassinger, who arrives on the set of an unnamed picture being shot in Reno to coax his befogged and legendary pupil, here a near-wordless character known as Kitty (Heather Prete), out of her chemical haze and into working order.
Decked out in beautifully absurd flame-red cowboy boots — he’s like a Manhattan Gabby Hayes, with airs — Lang mixes it up to memorable results with Linda Lavin’s Flora Fassinger, Kitty’s coach and handler. Shrewdly written with equal parts admiration and contempt, ripely and wittily acted, these two take the stage clean away from Miller’s other characters, who are given to unhealthy portions of what Flora calls “caviar philosophy.”
Visual references to “The Misfits” have not been deemed off-limits in Falls’ production. On the shifting front-piece panels of scenic designer Thomas Lynch’s first-rate set, we’re shown raw black-and-white footage of the movie being made. Kitty is seen in fragments, running through the desert, in take after take.
The panels open to reveal a Reno hotel penthouse suite, all flagstone and low-slung furniture. The occupant is the film’s producer, former trucking company executive Phillip Ochsner (Stacy Keach). The producer has come to Reno to see if Kitty’s drugged, boozed-up tardiness has become chronic enough to prevent the film’s completion.
A nude and disoriented Kitty has been wandering the hotel hallways. One by one, the key players enter the penthouse. First is Edna (Frances Fisher, very earnest), Kitty’s devoted secretary and, as of the previous night, paramour of the recently widowed Ochsner. Then comes the burly, ‘gator-wrestling Hustonian type, director Derek Clemson (Harris Yulin, spraying extra gravel on his vowel sounds). Ochsner has seen the rushes and pronounced the footage “kind of beautiful but cool as a rose.” He, like everyone on the planet, is in love with Kitty and in a patronizing, patriarchal way he wants to save her.
Flora swans in complaining of the size of her room, wondering if the shoot has been canceled for the day. The director of photography is Terry Case (Scott Glenn, roguishly funny, but what’s with the swinging-arms routine?). He cuts through the blather with his assessment of what’s important in movies: “ass,” and “animalism.”
Twenty minutes into “Finishing the Picture,” as an unseen forest fire rages in the distance beyond Reno, you sense a problem. Everyone talks about the film being “out of control.” Yet as written and directed, the pacing is leisurely bordering on languid. Too little creative tension is conveyed, either by way of Miller’s small talk or his large talk. And when Miller’s large talk takes over, watch out — especially coming from the likes of Matthew Modine, monotonal and not ready for prime stage time as the tormented screenwriter. He is not the actor to activate such mouthfuls as: “What we had that was alive and crazy has been pounded into some hateful, ordinary dust.”
Act 2 takes a stylistic jump, to mixed results. In Ochsner’s darkened bedroom, Kitty veers in and out of lucidity (though not her clothes; she’s naked to a rather numbing extent in this production) as friends, colleagues and exploiters appeal to her better professional instincts. On a translucent screen downstage, sepia-toned live video projects the images of the actors’ heads. The justification, I suppose, is that this is a play about the making of a movie. Yet it’s more visual curiosity than thematic complement.
In the near-mute Kitty, Miller has created a symbol and a sounding board for the other characters. Yet as the characters rhapsodize about this shining star on the decline, you wonder: Does Miller know how condescending all this sounds? A key moment near the end has Edna saying all Kitty needed was “a little . . . you know . . . consideration,” and her colleagues bust out laughing. The audience does not. The joke, which relates to how much care and feeding went into the job of getting a particular superstar into finishing “The Misfits,” is at once obvious and disappointingly flat.
The cast’s ringers bring enormous skill to the material. Keach’s producer is Mr. Rhetorical Question, constantly wondering aloud how someone as beautiful and fabulous as Kitty could be so unhappy. (Keach hacks his way through the exposition and proves he is first-rate stage technician: Let’s see him back here in another play, soon.) Late in Act 1 he finally gets a chance to unleash some anger in the direction of the interloping Fassingers. Suddenly “Finishing the Picture” takes on a new palette. There’s only one word for what Keach, Lang and Lavin bring to their clash, the most arresting scene in Miller’s script: animalism. These are three stage animals.
Miller’s slyly parodic Strasbergs-in-disguise are compelling because they are not simple, though they are comic. “Suddenly, everything depends on me?” Jerome bristles. “I have never said I was responsible for her!” He sounds like the patriarch in “All My Sons,” which Miller wrote around the time Marilyn Monroe made her first picture. In the Fassingers, Miller works everything out to his wobbly play’s advantage: an old grudge or two, perhaps, along with his conflicted feelings about Monroe’s Actors Studio mentors.
They are the play. They’re the best of the three, anyway, currently on stage at the Goodman.
– – –
“Finishing the Picture”
When: Through Nov. 7
Where: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.
Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes
Tickets: $20-$60 at 312-443-3800
– – –
GOOD QUESTION
Who were Paula and Lee Strasberg?
Q. Arthur Miller’s new play, “Finishing the Picture,” ostensibly is about his former wife Marilyn Monroe and the filming of “The Misfits.” The play features Stephen Lang and Linda Lavin as acting coaches and gurus Jerome and Flora, thinly veiled versions of Lee and Paula Strasberg. Who were the Strasbergs?
A. Lee Strasberg (1901-1982) popularized “The Method” style of acting, and from 1948 until his death he served as artistic director of the Actors Studio where he and his wife taught the technique.
Monroe was a favored pupil and Strasberg’s first wife, Paula (1934-1966), was Monroe’s personal on-set acting coach for the filming of several movies, including the tumultuous making of “The Misfits.”
Students of “The Method,” which encourages actors to “live” in their roles by drawing on emotional experience and memory, include Monroe, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Al Pacino, Geraldine Page, Anne Bancroft, Rod Steiger, Patricia Neal, Sidney Poitier and Dustin Hoffman, among others.
Lee Strasberg said: “Work for the actor lies in two areas: the ability to consistently create reality and the ability to express that reality.”
In 1975, Lee Strasberg was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar for his first movie performance as Hyman Roth in “The Godfather: Part II.” His student, Robert De Niro, won the award instead.
Paula did not have a screen career, possibly because director Elia Kazan named her as a member of the Communist Party in 1952 in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
When Monroe died in 1962, she left Lee Strasberg a portion of her estate along with her personal possessions. In her will, Monroe asked that Strasberg distribute her effects “among my friends, colleagues and those to whom I am devoted.” Strasberg never did, and after his death, Monroe’s clothing and belongings went to his second wife, Anna, who sold them in a Christie’s auction in 1999. The auction took in $13.4 million.
