By the Word Productions premiered Franca Miraglia’s American Devotion in the Studio at Crow’s Theatre on Thursday. The playwright imagines what might have happened if Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe had invited Norman Mailer and his wife over for dinner or drinks at their Connecticut farmhouse.

In American Devotion Mailer shows up at the Millers having engineered a drinks invitation but leaving his wife behind. He has a cunning plan to use Miller’s upcoming appearance before the House Unamerican Activities Committee to their mutual advantage; Miller will be spared jail and Mailer will get the publicity his flagging career desperately needs. If Marilyn can be persuaded to cooperate.

The men start to drink. Marilyn doesn’t appear. As two bottles of bourbon disappear Mailer gets steadily more misogynist and more violent; Miller gets steadily more priggish and self righteous. Their “conversation” is punctuated by multiple attempts by Miller to persuade Marilyn to get dressed and come down. She doesn’t. She pops pills; lots of them, and with each conversation with Miller gets more self pitying and more paranoid. She never does appear.

The one thing the men agree on; apart from distaste for McCarthy and all his little wizards, is a profoundly negative reaction to Waiting for Godot. Miller has seen it and judged it an offence to everything theatre should be. Mailer hasn’t seen it but a suitably splenetic review got him the publicity he wanted. Parallels with American Devotion hardly need drawing out.

So there it is; an evening in the company of three extremely unsympathetic people, and you don’t even get bourbon (or whatever you’ve replaced it with in Fordistan) to help you cope. No drinks allowed in the theatre.

Director and cast make a decent fist of presenting the piece. Mario D’Alimonte’s direction is straightforward with the flipping from room to room helped by effective lighting by Chris Northey. Mark Rittinger makes a bluff, believable and loud Mailer well matched by Holm Bradwell as Miller, who does supercilious creep really well. I don’t know what else Misha Harding could have done with Marilyn. There’s only so much an actor can make of pill popping and whining. Still, they tried.

Flawed concept or flawed execution? I’m not sure. Either way not my idea of a fun or cathartic evening. American Devotion continues at Crow’s Theatre until June 21st.

Photo Credit: Doug Raaflaub