Culture Watch

The Still Misunderstood Marilyn Monroe Wiggles through the 1950s with a Little Help from a Friend

by Bruce Chadwick

Bruce Chadwick lectures on history and film at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He also teaches writing at New Jersey City University. He holds his PhD from Rutgers and was a former editor for the New York Daily News.

Siren’s Heart: Marilyn in Purgatory
Theater for the New City
155 First Avenue
New York, N.Y.

Is there anything left to write about Marilyn Monroe? The tragic movie star, who died at age 36 in the spring of 1962, has been written about in books, magazines and newspapers, made the central character in numerous films, documentaries and television shows and even pops up as a character for Halloween costumes.

What more is there to say?

Plenty.

Actress Louisa Bradshaw takes on the long-dead sex symbol in a one-woman show, Siren’s Heart: Marilyn in Purgatory at New York’s Theater for the New City. She turns the Monroe myth upside down, cuts out the breathy voice and presents the behind-the-scenes Marilyn, speaking from purgatory. Bradshaw’s Monroe, usually without the blonde wig, offers a rather low-key explanation for many events of the movie superstar’s professional life, which began on the pages of Playboy and ended on a coroner’s table in Los Angeles.

The play is at times very good and at times very frustrating. Sometimes Bradshaw really seems to capture the “victimized” Monroe but at other times she seems to lose touch with her. It is a good one-woman show and yet a show that you wish plunged deeper into the mysteries of the sex siren that has held court in America for nearly sixty years, dead and alive.

The show begins with Bradshaw playing Monroe’s mother, who wound up in a hospital and seemed to marvel at anything positive her daughter did. The innocent Norma Jean, as Bradshaw says, then turned into Marilyn Monroe. Bradshaw takes us through the Monroe Hall of Fame—the Playboy spread, her hit films, her marriage(s) to baseball slugger Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller and her endless battles with other actors and directors in her films. The show is peppered with actual voiceover quotes from the people who worked with her, and hated her. Along the way, the audience learns a lot about the 1950s, the film industry, the Korean War, Jack Kennedy and casual drugs.

The great success of the show is that Bradshaw presents Monroe as a rather ordinary woman who just cannot figure out why she became so famous. Bradshaw looks at her from the outside and sees a plain and troubled woman hurled into a worldwide stardom that she could not handle. She says that Groucho Marx probably described Marilyn best when he said she was Betty Boop and Mae West at the same time.

Bradshaw makes much of Monroe’s fabled visit to the troops in the Korean War with the Bob Hope USO show. In Korea, in front of 17,000 men, she received a rousing welcome and lots of love. Bradshaw, as Marilyn, says she never had that warmth in films, where she just made a movie with no audience and went home.

The frustrating thing about this historical look at Monroe and the 1950s is that the script of writer Walt Stepp leaves many wide gaps in her story. There is no mention of how she got into films, why she married the men she did, whether or not she slept with President Kennedy and, most importantly, how she died (in a short line she said it was accidental).

These are the secrets you want to find out about in a play and the script just does not have them. There is also not enough about why Monroe, who was a pretty good actress, felt she had no future in films. Nobody else thought she did, either. Here, Marilyn, complaining to the audience, says she wound up like Elvis Presley, full of talent but barred from using it.

The play has several songs that don’t add to the story and could be cut. Bradshaw does her work in a living room set with a dressing area and spends a lot of time taking wigs on and off. She spends a LOT of time doing and redoing the legendary scene from The Seven Year Itch. when a draft from a subway grate blew her flimsy white dress higher than her hips. The actress is quite good as the ordinary Marilyn, but never quite explains, or shows, why the blonde actress became such a superstar. What was it? What did she have that thousands of other good looking actresses did not? And what was it about the 1950s that enabled someone like her to become so famous so fast?

In the end, the audience remains unfulfilled in this show about one of the most famous women that ever lived and the show business of the 1950s and early 1960s. Maybe that’s the way it should be, though. Bradshaw could not explain her? Neither has anybody else in the nearly fifty years since she died.

PRODUCTION: Produced by the Theater for the New City. Lighting: William Giraldo, Set: David Zen Mansley, Choreographer: Donald Garverick, Musical Director Gregory Nissen. Directed by Lissa Moira

Bruce Chadwick can be reached at bchadwick@njcu.edu.