Monroe Play Offers Insight Into Actress’ Tragic Tale

WALLA WALLA -- The set never changes throughout the play.

We're always just a breath away from Marilyn Monroe in her sanctum: in her bedroom, in her dressing room, at her makeup table, eavesdropping on her telephone conversations and listening to her innermost thoughts about fame, relationships, sex and acting.

From a seat in the Powerhouse Theater balcony watching "Marilyn: Forever Blonde" is like being a fly on the wall in the "sex goddess'" home, while her life flashes before our eyes from the birth of a star to the death of a wholly unfulfilled actress.

"I could have had any man I wanted," Monroe muses at one point. "But no one wanted the real me. The studios thought I was valuable as a sex stimulant. I wanted to be a credible actress."

Carefully researched and extracted from Monroe's 36 years on earth, "Marilyn: Forever Blonde" is less interpretation and more a musical docudrama that gets its hooks in you and won't let go.

Actress Sunny Thompson, who visited Waitsburg and Dayton last week to help promote her two-week play in Walla Walla, does a superb job taking us on the emotional rollercoaster that was Norma Jeane Baker's life as the iconic Monroe.

Resembling Monroe in voice and physique, if not in studied style, Thompson's per- formance embodies the woman behind the legend. When the play is over, you feel like you just awoke from a dream in which you met her.

As Harry Hosey, Shakespeare Walla Walla board president, said during his introduction of the play: "This is as real as it gets."

What few actors manage -- captivating an audience with a one-person play -- Thompson, her husband Greg Thompson as the playwright, and director Stephanie Shine, nail in this riveting glimpse of Monroe's life.

Frank Sinatra's "Fools Rush In" sets the historic tone for the play, taking us back to the late 1940s when Monroe got her start as an actress in Hollywood, though the point in time when we first see her, wrapped in satin sheets for poses in a photo shoot, is at the end of her life.

The narrative voices of those who worked with Monroe, from the photographer at her last shoot to her producers and her partners from three marriages, give the play one of its interactive dimensions.

Together with them, "Marilyn" tells her stories to the audience in that unmistakably breathy voice we've seen in her famous clips: from her youth in foster homes to her explosion to fame.

"At age 12," when started to "develop," the world suddenly became friendly to her with whistles and honking horns from boys and men.

Quite open about her use and success of sexual favors to advance her career, Monroe lets us in to the not-so-big secret that "everybody did it." But we hear from her first modeling agent that Monroe, who knew the least when she started, worked the hardest.

Although she now had work as a model, stardom didn't come until her talent agent and partner Johnny Hyde introduced her to John Houston, who said she was "one step from oblivion" when he hired her for a role in "Asphalt Jungle" in 1950.

The rest is Hollywood history, from which we learn from Monroe through witty intimate narrative and some 17 of her songs, delivered with the celebrity's vintage smoky resonance.

The play never loses its pace. It is really like having that platonic but flirtatious evening with Monroe none of us ever had. In the end, we become the shoulder she cries on with a genuine outpouring of professional and personal frustration Monroe experienced as an actress and a partner of the likes of baseball star Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller.

She shares with us how she miscarried a baby with Miller three times and felt like a failure as a woman, further exacerbated by her fear of losing her sex appeal.

"When my face goes and my body goes, I will be nothing all over again," she frets. "I want to be loved for myself. It's (love) the only thing immortal thing about us."

Marilyn: Forever Blonde

Runs Through Oct. 30

Powerhouse Theater

Walla Walla

Tickets:

http://www.shakespearewallawalla.org