A mother lost, an artist found

Antony Penrose grew up with a mother who kept the better part of herself locked in the attic above his bedroom in an English farmhouse.

His play, “Lee Miller, the Angel and the Fiend,” tells the story of the remarkable woman she was. Penrose discovered the angel only after her death in 1977, having suffered the fiend for most of the 30 years that came before.

Miller’s life and work are chronicled in “Surrealist Muse,” an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum that runs through June 15 and gave rise to Penrose’s play. The art show’s four rooms of paintings and photographs, and the five-character script, trace a life that could belong to a character in a novel.

Miller debuted as a model in Roaring ‘20s New York, a magnetic blond beauty splashed on the pages of Conde Nast’s magazines. She matured in 1930s Paris, first inspiring the likes of Pablo Picasso and her lover, Man Ray, then emerging as an artist in her own right, a photographer who often made famous men and women -- including Picasso and Man Ray -- her subjects. Her career crested during World War II, when Miller, writing and shooting for Vogue, produced shocking, unsparing reportage from the front lines, including indelible images of heaped corpses and living skeletons at the Dachau concentration camp and a wrenching portrait of a dying infant in a Viennese hospital. After filing from Dachau, she cabled her editor in capital letters: “I IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE.”

Penrose grew up ignorant of all this. His mother refused to talk about it, and his father, painter and art historian Roland Penrose, honored her wishes. Antony Penrose didn’t get to truly know his mother until his wife, Suzanna, summoned him to the attic shortly after Miller’s death and showed him boxes filled with her pictures, her writings, her life. A filmmaker and dairy farmer, he became his mother’s biographer and the custodian of his parents’ artistic legacy.

Penrose has integrated much of that hidden hoard into “Lee Miller, the Angel and the Fiend,” which premiered with three performances at the Getty this month and opens this weekend at the Chance Theater in Anaheim Hills. In another familial twist, the author’s second cousin, Erika Ceporius, the grandniece of Lee Miller, plays the title role. Penrose culled much of the script from letters and diaries he found in the farmhouse trove; rather than playing out scenes face-to-face, the actors deliver their parts directly to the audience while a series of 318 images of and by Lee Miller are projected above them.

The title is not Penrose’s comment on his mother’s character, but her own: “I looked like an angel,” she wrote in a diary, “but I was a fiend inside.”

Traumatic childhood

As he tracked down Miller’s story after her death, Penrose, 55, learned from one of her two brothers that the son of a family friend had raped Miller and infected her with a venereal disease when she was 7 years old. That, Penrose thinks, planted a seed of “self-revulsion” that would allow her to label herself a fiend, to fall into alcoholism and to cordon off the most exceptional parts of herself from her son. What he got growing up, he says, was a heap of abuse: “She’d never clout me, but she could be immensely cruel, emotionally cruel. She was very good with words and could skin the hide off me. I really hated her.”

He credits his wife, who hit it off with Miller, with helping him eventually to make his peace with his mother near the end of her life. But true understanding came only from the attic after Miller’s death. In the play, Penrose decided to omit the childhood trauma that could have been the root of her anguish.

“It’s too tempting for people to see Lee as a damaged, tragic figure. I wanted on this occasion not to dwell on that, but to look at the body of her work.”

When the Getty OKd his idea of staging a play to accompany its exhibit, Penrose turned immediately to the Chance. He is close to his California family -- all relations on his mother’s side. He had watched his young cousin, Ceporius, pursue acting from high school to drama studies in London to her 1999 co-founding of the Chance, a 54-seat theater in a suburban office-industrial park.

Ceporius, 25, says it had long been a sort of family joke that she would one day play Lee Miller in the movies -- Penrose having tried for years to interest producers in the story.

When her chance came on stage, Penrose was not without misgivings. “I said to her, ‘You’ve got the nice, but you need the nasty. You can do the angel bit, but I need to be convinced that you can do the fiend bit.’ ”

With some help from Penrose and a dialect coach, Ceporius came up with a New York accent (Miller hailed from Poughkeepsie) that packs a tough, ragged punch. Penrose says she has captured his edgy mom.

The show marks Ceporius’ debut under her new stage name, Erika C. Miller. The switch points up her blood ties to her role, but is also, she says, a way of henceforth matching her performing name to the “standard American girl-next-door type” she projects.

Director Oanh Nguyen, another Chance co-founder, thought there was a missing element in the script itself: It needed more of Penrose. Nguyen wanted to frame the piece with the image of Penrose in the farmhouse attic, discovering his mother for the first time, and he wanted to flesh out the fleeting bits Penrose had written for the actor who would play himself.

“He had his hesitations,” said Nguyen, 29, who is married to Ceporius. “He was modest, and he didn’t want to be the focal point.”

Kidman as Miller?

Penrose, whose soft, polite voice projects great passion for his mother’s work, is modest about his first venture as a playwright. After deciding to tell the stories with excerpts from the characters’ own writings, he says, it was more a matter of editing a bunch of eloquent, intrinsically dramatic people than creating a play from whole cloth. Besides Penrose and his parents, the characters are Man Ray and David Scherman, an American photojournalist who was Lee Miller’s lover and colleague during World War II.

For Penrose, the definitive dramatic word on Lee Miller isn’t his own, but David Hare’s. The British playwright has crafted a screenplay about her life, tailored for Nicole Kidman. Since 1998, Kidman (via her former husband Tom Cruise’s production company, Cruise/Wagner) has held the rights to Penrose’s 1985 biography, “The Lives of Lee Miller.” Hare and Kidman have a track record together. She was famously unclad in London and New York in 1998-99 while starring in “The Blue Room,” his adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s “La Ronde,” and he wrote the screenplay for “The Hours,” which featured Kidman as another troubled artist, novelist Virginia Woolf -- a performance for which she recently won the Oscar for best actress.

“I feel as if Lee is in safe hands with those two,” Penrose says. “If they make it as it’s written now, it’s going to be fantastic and I’m going to love it.”

Ceporius apparently won’t get to live out her girlhood fantasy of playing her great-aunt on screen, but she and Nguyen, a film actor himself, will happily settle for having teamed with Penrose to put Lee Miller on stage for the first time. The couple, who married two years ago after he proposed to her on the Chance’s stage, took out $75,000 in loans to fund the theater’s launching. Now in its fifth season, the Chance has emerged as a prolific little theater that typically produces more than 10 plays a year -- unknown new works, many of them on historical subjects, as well as standards such as a series of pocket-sized productions of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. Now, they say, the debt is virtually paid off and the 18-member company hopes to move to a bigger space in Orange County.

While the Chance partners bring “Lee Miller, the Angel and the Fiend” to their home theater, the play is having its British premiere this weekend in conjunction with a Lee Miller exhibit at the University of Manchester. Penrose says showings of his mother’s photography have been “almost continuous” somewhere or other in the world over the past five years, and now he’ll offer exhibitors his play as a complement to her images.

In the play’s final moment, Ceporius poses in a white gown, arms outstretched, wing-like, as she re-creates in bloodline-accurate flesh the photo of her great-aunt that’s blown up behind her. It’s the angel redeemed from the fiend, a once-embittered son’s excavation into the past having unlocked, at last, an understanding, an appreciation, a sense of connection.

“I gave the world a photographer who was previously unknown,” Penrose’s character says near the end of the play. “But I also gave myself a mother who was previously unknown to me.”

*

‘Lee Miller, the Angel and the Fiend’

Where: Chance Theater, 5576 E. La Palma Ave., Anaheim Hills

When: Saturdays and Sundays, 5 p.m.

Ends: May 18

Price: $13-$15

Contact: (714) 777-3033; www.chancetheater.com

Also

When: “Surrealistic Muse: Lee Miller, Roland Penrose and Man Ray,” Tuesdays-Sundays, through June 15

Where: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles

Price: Admission is free, parking is $5

Contact: (310) 440-7300; www.getty.edu