The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe, which opens this weekend at Theatre II of the University of South Florida, is a wild, surrealistic rhapsody on the themes of Hollywood, fame, and the icon-making frenzy of a legend-starved public. In one scene after the next, Monroe's story is told as an exercise in the mythological/grotesque, where giant producers whimsically make and break lives, where testosterone-drunk supplicants throw countless gifts at the royal feet and unbalanced devotees of Beauty dream of a sacred word from the Platinum Princess. To add to the chaos, director Bob Gonzalez has not one but six different actresses play Marilyn Monroe (German playwright Gerlind Reinshagen demands that there be at least three), and has put the tragi-farce on a set (courtesy of Barton Lee) redolent of the circus and dominated by a backwards and distorted Hollywood sign. Put it all together — the rabid reporters, the 10-second husbands, the GIs in sexual bedlam; add the holy-martyr trio of James Dean, Sharon Tate and Judy Garland, who come to taunt and cajole, and one thing is very clear: This is not your ordinary stage biography. Not by a long shot.
"The story," says Gonzalez, as we talk in the lobby of USF Theater 2, is not so much about Marilyn; it's about people's idea of Marilyn, created through the media, through the publicity of the studios, and people's own fantasies. So it's really about people, and about people's need to make up stories about their icons, and to have icons to begin with."
Gonzalez thinks that Monroe was such an accommodating object of American fantasy because the media of her time produced such an abundance of material about her, even when there was no particular occasion. "When she was a contract player, because there was often nothing for her to do, no assignment, they just actually photographed her ad infinitum," he says. "So there's almost an unending amount of material … about her out there. And then of course, since she married two highly visible husbands, you know, there was stuff in the tabloids all the time."
What's it like to be Marilyn Monroe? One of the six Marilyns in the production is USF senior Sharon Chudnow, who's also appeared in several Jobsite Theater productions, including The Ruins and Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Chudnow describes the play as "looking at Marilyn in a mirror that's cracked and amplified," and, like Gonzalez, says that she's come to respect Monroe as she's investigated her life more closely.
"She subverted the system a lot of times," Chudnow says, emphasizing that Monroe studied with famed and acting instructor Michael Chekhov and read Russian Playwrights.
I sort of admire that she grabbed onto life, using what she thought were her strengths or skills."
Chudnow also thinks she's found an explanation for many of Monroe's behaviors: "She had no foundation. I mean, she was shipped from foster home to orphanage, to this caretaker and to that caretaker, and she learned that she was expendable. … So she would show the people what they wanted to see, in order for her to be accepted, so they wouldn't throw her out. … She really wanted to shine so that she would be kept, so that somebody would want to keep her."
It was Gonzalez, who has been an adjunct professor at USF and also teaches at Hillsborough Community College, who asked the six Marilyns to research the actress' life closely, lest the production become "a real sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek distortion of the life." But even so, Gonzalez says, the play is "not a documentary — people really ought to know that, especially diehard Marilyn fans who know all the facts. … I mean, there are incongruities, anachronisms."
And the form of the play is far from the fourth-wall realism that purports to show life as it happened. Instead, the work is an exercise in Brechtian epic theater, with projected titles, photographic slides, actors talking directly to the audience, and short, episodic blackout scenes, some of which contain three Marilyns on stage simultaneously.
Gonzalez thinks Reinshagen has excellent reasons for portraying many Marilyns. "One thing that she's showing in the play is that Marilyn had a lot of stories and a lot of sides to her," he says, "and people chose what they wanted to hear. So she presented herself as a serious actress or as a humanitarian, but people just wanted to hear about her dress strap breaking."
Gonzalez further expanded the number of Marilyns to six for several reasons: to give more students opportunities, to facilitate costume changes, and simply to divide the burden of the role — "If only one person played Marilyn, it would be a Herculean task."
Chudnow, who says she plays the "nearly gone, you know, mentally, Marilyn Monroe," says that working with Gonzalez has been "wonderful. He's very kind, he's very patient, he is open to ideas. Right from the start he asked the cast for suggestions. It was very much an ensemble. And, you know, if we had a good idea and it contradicted what he was thinking, he took that idea, if it worked, if it was better. And so he was really great to work with."
Who was the real Marilyn Monroe? Maybe there wasn't one, Chudnow suggests: "She allowed everyone to define her. She had a very fractured background. And she was one of the first manufactured personalities — the epitome of the manufactured personality, to come out of Hollywood. But it was really her own creation; Hollywood helped it along a little bit.
"But really she drove herself on."
This article appears in Apr 5-11, 2001.