Miller revisits his ill-fated ‘Misfits’

On the nervous, much-photographed movie set of “The Misfits,” Henri Cartier-Bresson took a picture of screenwriter Arthur Miller scrunched in a director’s chair. In the picture, just behind Miller, his then-wife Marilyn Monroe is receiving advice from her acting coach, a small woman in a huge bell-shaped hat named Paula Strasberg. She was married to Lee Strasberg, founder of the Actors Studio and inspiration (or Svengali) to a postwar generation of American actors, Monroe most starry among them.

The quarter-smile on Miller’s face suggests a man wondering if there might be a play in what he’s hearing. It is the image of a writer storing a few nuts away for winter.

Forty-four years later, Miller -- who this month turns 89 -- has unveiled “Finishing the Picture,” a static memory play, though not without moments of electricity.

It really is three competing plays, all on stage at the same time at the Goodman Theatre, coexisting uneasily within the same frame. One is a roman a clef about the mess behind the making of “The Misfits.” Miller has downplayed this, as he did 40 years ago with “After the Fall,” his previous Monroe-haunted work.

The second play attempts to get past the obvious real-life parallels and deal with larger issues: The mystique of stardom; the matter of being born lucky versus not, which harks back to Miller’s first Broadway effort, “The Man Who Had All the Luck”; and, in line with the writer’s lifelong theme, the question of where one person’s responsibility to another begins and ends.

Then there’s the third play, the one that works. This one starts nearly an hour into the draggy first act of “Finishing the Picture.” It’s about the Strasbergs, here disguised as the Fassingers. In director Robert Falls’ production, Stephen Lang plays Jerome Fassinger, who arrives on the set of an unnamed picture being shot in Reno to coax his befogged and legendary pupil, here a near-wordless character known as Kitty (Heather Prete), out of her chemical haze and into working order.

Decked out in beautifully absurd flame-red cowboy boots -- he’s like a Manhattan Gabby Hayes, with airs -- Lang mixes it up to memorable results with Linda Lavin’s Flora Fassinger, Kitty’s coach and handler. Shrewdly written with equal parts admiration and contempt, ripely and wittily acted, these two take the stage clean away from Miller’s other characters, who are given to unhealthy portions of what Flora calls “caviar philosophy.”

Visual references to “The Misfits,” which was directed by John Huston, have not been deemed off-limits in Falls’ production. On the shifting front-piece panels of designer Thomas Lynch’s first-rate set, we’re shown raw black-and-white footage of the movie being made. Kitty is seen in fragments, running through the desert, in take after take.

The panels open to reveal a Reno hotel penthouse, all flagstone and low-slung furniture. The occupant is the film’s producer, former trucking executive Phillip Ochsner (Stacy Keach). The producer has come to Reno to see if Kitty’s drugged, boozed-up tardiness has become chronic enough to prevent the film from completion.

A nude and disoriented Kitty has been wandering the hotel hallways. One by one, the key players enter the penthouse. First is Edna (Frances Fisher, very earnest), Kitty’s devoted secretary and, as of the previous night, paramour of the recently widowed Ochsner.

Then comes the burly Hustonian type, director Derek Clemson (Harris Yulin, spraying extra gravel on his vowel sounds). Ochsner has seen the rushes and pronounced the footage “kind of beautiful but cool as a rose.” He, like everyone on the planet, is crazy in love with Kitty and in a patronizing, patriarchal way he wants to save her.

Flora swans in complaining of the size of her room, wondering if the shoot has been canceled for the day. The director of photography is Terry Case (Scott Glenn, roguishly funny). He cuts through the blather with his assessment of what’s important in movies: “animalism.”

Twenty minutes into “Finishing the Picture,” as an unseen forest fire rages in the distance, beyond Reno, you sense a problem. Everyone talks about the film being “out of control.” Yet as written and directed, the pacing is leisurely, bordering on languid. Too little creative tension is conveyed, either by way of Miller’s small talk or his large talk. And when Miller’s large talk takes over, watch out -- especially coming from the likes of Matthew Modine, monotonal and not ready for prime stage time as the tormented screenwriter. He is not the actor to activate such mouthfuls as: “What we had that was alive and crazy has been pounded into some hateful, ordinary dust.”

The cast’s ringers bring enormous skill to the material. Keach’s producer is Mr. Rhetorical Question, constantly wondering aloud how someone as beautiful and fabulous as Kitty could be so unhappy. (Keach hacks his way through the exposition and proves he is first-rate stage technician) Late in Act 1, he finally gets a chance to unleash some anger in the direction of the interloping Fassingers. Suddenly “Finishing the Picture” takes on a new palette. There’s only one word for what Keach, Lang and Lavin bring to their clash, the most arresting scene in Miller’s script: animalism. These are three stage animals.