Theater: Scenes from A Marriage, Part 2

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People who were offended at the way Miller treated Monroe in After the Fall won't like Finishing the Picture any better. Kitty (Heather Prete) is mostly offstage (and when onstage, mostly mute), the object of everyone else's analysis. They romanticize her fragility ("She's been stepping on broken glass since she could walk"). They lament the burden of fame ("Everyone wants something from her; we're no exceptions"). In After the Fall the Marilyn character (especially as played by the magnetic Carla Gugino in the recent revival) was an alternately charming and infuriating force of nature. Here she's the wreckage from a storm, with the survivors left to pick through the rubble.

Miller views himself with the same brutal candor. The screenwriter, Kitty's husband (Matthew Modine), is just one of many satellites orbiting Kitty's imploding star, wanly resigned to a marriage all but over--and to the screams Kitty emits the minute he enters her room. Together with After the Fall, Finishing the Picture completes a portrait of a marriage that can take its place beside Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as one of the most ruthless and revealing in American theater history. For this celebrated, embattled playwright just turned 89, Marilyn is still an inspiration.