A Beautiful Child

Description
*** [THREE STARS] A beautiful child is just what Marilyn Monroe was, in many more ways than were ever fully realized on the screen. Without makeup, dressed shabbily, her dark roots exposed underneath that platimun helmet—-this is the Norma Jean to which only someone like Truman Capote could be privvy. And only he could completely capture the naïveté, childlike fear, vulgarity and puckishness she displayed in unguarded moments. After her death, Capote wrote about a day spent with Monroe—-beginning at the early-afternoon funeral of her acting coach, his friend Constance Collier, and ending in the fading light of the South Street Seaport. Before attending the Fringe show that shares that story’s name, I reread Capote's piece (from the collection "Music for Chameleons"), but it turned out I needn’t have; the actors would do it for me, in a more or less word-for-word dramatic reading of the original. I suspect Truman will forgive me for co-opting one of his best lines: That’s not adapting—-it’s reciting. A successful staging of this piece would call for an extremely inventive retelling-—a total reimagining of the characterizations, for instance, or at least some metaphorical exploration of the relationship that exists between the pages. Instead, Joel Van Liew’s Truman is made to repeat every line like the diminutive writer’s pet crow, down to the “she said”s and “he said”s that introduce the narrative’s dialogue: This piece was written as a nonfiction portrait, not a stage play, making an as-is adaptation of it clunky and distracting. And while Van Liew and his Monroe, Maura Lisabeth Malloy, exude quiet charm and share a chemistry all their own (it would be virtually impossible to re-create the author and sexpot’s relationship under these conditions), director Linda Powell gives them little else to work with in these 45 minutes. Oh well, at least every word is Tru.—-Erin Meister, Copy Editor