Ben Whishaw and Renée Fleming star in Norma Jeane Baker of Troy at the Shed (photo by Stephanie Berger)
The Shed
The Griffin Theater in the Bloomberg Building
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 14, $49-$172
646-455-3494
theshed.org
An alarming number of walkouts were noted during previews of Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, the inaugural production at the Shed, the sprawling new arts center at Hudson Yards, even though the show runs a mere ninety minutes and boasts the all-star duo of actor Ben Whishaw (His Dark Materials, The Crucible) and opera legend Renée Fleming (Carousel, Living on Love). When I saw it last week, only one couple got up and left, about halfway through; however, there was an embarrassing amount of empty seats in the Griffin Theater, which can hold five hundred. Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is an incomprehensible experimental melologue, combining spoken dialogue by Anne Carson with vocal and instrumental music by Paul Clark. It’s an anachronistic mash-up of Euripides’s 412 BCE play Helen with the tabloid-style tale of Marilyn Monroe, equating the two sex symbols as tragic heroines of different kinds of wars initiated by men. (Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson in 1926 but often used the last name of her mother’s second husband, John Newton Baker.)
Renée Fleming and Ben Whishaw share an intimate moment in incomprehensible mash-up at the new Griffin Theater (photo by Stephanie Berger)
It’s New Year’s Eve, 1963, and while everyone else in New York City is partying, an unidentified man (Whishaw) and woman (Fleming) are sitting at a small desk in a dark, noirish office with large windows in the back. (The too-long set is by Alex Eales.) While he dictates what appears to be a screenplay, alternating with narrated “History of War” tapes, she dutifully types into her stenography machine, occasionally repeating a phrase out loud in song. (It was sometime difficult to tell if Fleming was singing live or some of her sung dialogue was prerecorded; the sound design is by Donato Wharton.) He is a straightforward, persnickety fellow, declaring every bit of punctuation and line break. His story involves Helen and Marilyn as well as Truman Capote, Homer, Pearl Bailey, Menelaus, Fritz Lang, Hermione, and “Arthur, king of Sparta and New York,” most likely a reference to Arthur Miller, the native Manhattanite who was married to Monroe from 1956 to 1961.
He sometimes adds a newspaper article or other piece of paper to an easel like detectives do when tracking down criminal masterminds. However, very little of it makes any sense. Carson (The Mile-Long Opera, Autobiography of Red) is an award-winning Canadian poet and essayist and teacher of ancient Greek whose translations of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides have been performed by Classic Stage Company, but Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is impenetrable. (Dare I say it was Greek to me?) It feels as if she and director Katie Mitchell, a veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre known for her adventurous, controversial productions (The Waves, The Seagull), are trying to confuse and, well, bore the audience. In that regard, they are thoroughly successful.