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| Marilyn Monroe's life charted in one-woman show (B) | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| By Chris Page, Get Out | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| September 21, 2007 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
Forty-five years after her apparent suicide — with hundreds of books about her since written — we’re no closer to understanding. And that’s exactly why the woman born Norma Jeane Mortenson died one of America’s enduring icons. The power of Monroe, after all, was pure projection. With a little help from a platinum dye-job, she became the 1950s apotheosis of the dumb blonde, pouting her lips through films such as “Some Like It Hot” and “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” Hers was a pliable personality formed from her days as a cheesecake pin-up model: I am, she seemed to say, whoever you want me to be. As in life, so in death. Biographers take no shame in wielding oftentimes contradictory collections of anecdotes, mixing them with notions from pop psychology, and chalking up new postmortem portraits. Monroe was a manipulated Hollywood commodity, a hollow thing with a rotten childhood and a pathological need for affection. Or, no, she was a shrewd image-maker in her own right. (The answer, of course, is probably somewhere in the middle.) The end result is less clear biography than the muddy stuff of myth. And there’s nothing juicier than myth translated to the stage. Valley actor/director David Lewis knows as much, sinking his teeth into the Monroe tale for his first stab at playwriting, “M.M.xx,” a one-woman show running through Oct. 6 at Mesa’s Desert Rose Theatre, sporting one awful name but starring East Valley stage powerhouse Katherine Stewart. Cherry-picking from the myth, Lewis paints a portrait of a depressive but intelligent woman fully in control of her goddess-like powers: “We all play parts to get the things we need,” his Marilyn says. “And they say I can’t act!” Though that kind of self-actualization doesn’t quell her deep inner sadness. Stewart plays Marilyn in her final evening, filling her stomach with barbiturates and booze, an insomniac regaling an empty room with her triumphs and regrets; her loves (DiMaggio, Miller, et al.), her dreams and her Faustian bargains for fame. It isn’t an impersonator routine; when Stewart dons the billowing pleated halter dress from “The Seven-Year Itch,” it’s only to prove the power of her allure before she rips aside the facade. “I made this from bits and pieces,” she says. “Like Frankenstein.” Often “M.M.xx” drifts into the hyperbole, melodrama and junky self-evaluation of an “E! True Hollywood Story” — the two-act show could stand to lose 20 minutes of such effluvia. Mostly, the show is redeemed by Stewart’s performance, an acting tour de force that stirs real emotion from a character who’s usually little more than caricature. A classically trained actress with china-white skin, Stewart dons platinum curls and vampy red lipstick, trying on dresses and flitting about Jennifer Shoemaker’s pitch-perfect set design, a pink and white bedroom punctuated by both a round, pink bed, and the mindless clutter of someone on a depressive bender. As “M.M.xx” winds to an end, the play suggests Monroe’s suicide was something like an inevitability: She had built her iconic status on beauty, that most fleeting of qualities. After all, Marilyn says, “the only future beauty has is to fade.” "M.M.xx" runs 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, closing Oct. 6, at Desert Rose Theatre, 1320 W. University Drive, Mesa. $12-$15. (480) 452-9649 or www.desertrosetheatre.com. Grade: B Contact Chris Page by email, or phone (480) 898-5656 |
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Reader comments (1)
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theo ross
This play looks like a drag queen. The real story is in the play Here I am mother, the real story of Marilyn Monroe by Monroe's real daughter.See the web of this for the only truth in over forty five years about the human being behind the nonsense. Suggest removal of this comment
February 19, 2008