Performance

Gary Tischler • September 21, 2012

If Gaetano Donizetti’s 1830 work, “Anna Bolena,” makes him the virtuoso of bel canto opera, it also presages what comes next. In the dexterous, emotionally powerful soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, we might just have the perfect performer that connects the Verdi generation to bell canto.

At least, that’s what she demonstrated in her star turn in the title role of the Washington National Opera production of “Anna Bolena,” ably abetted by a strong cast, by the inventive direction of Stephen Lawless and by a story that is familiar to contemporary audiences through the outpouring of contemporary and older pop culture versions in books, literature, television mini-series and films.

In short, we know these people, we know Henry VIII, the impetuous and sexy object of his desire Anne Boleyn, her lost lover Percy, the woman who replaces her, Jane Seymour, even if they’re called Enrico VIII, Anna Bolena, Riccardo and Giovanna Seymouor, as is the Italian wont of Donizetti.

Now, we know them a little and a lot better, given the emotional and dramatic intensity of the production, the seething, soaring quality of Donizetti’s music and Radvanovsky’s voice and acting ability, which gives the lie to bel canto’s reputation as a venue and stage for pure technique and beautiful singing. We do hear beautiful singing, often of the kind that, as it should in this case, has the power to break hearts and make you hold your breath. Bel canto singing of the kind evidenced in “Anna Bolena” is a little like white water rafting, it’s treacherous, dangerous, full of runs that rush like waves on top of each other, where major and even mistakes can strip a performer naked.

On the evidence of “Anna Bolena” (and I don’t have any other for her), Radvanovsky is one fine white water rafter and heartbreaker as well. She’s said that Maria Callas—who brought bell canto opera back to popularity almost singlehandedly and you can just imagine how—is her inspiration, and she does her proud. The trick with opera is not just to lay back and pinprick the notes and technique. That won’t satisfy the less-than-aficianados. It’s the temperament of opera, the willingness to go all in—reality and plausibility be damned—that makes it so appealing, such an experience, and in “Anna Bolena” the experience is dramatically achieved by inspired singing. That’s what happens in the famous duet of dueling rivals between Anna and Jane Seymour, a duel of riveting, warring emotions that span jealousy, guilt, forgiveness, resentment, great passions, emotionally clarity achieved through singing. In this duel , Sonia Gonassy as Jane holds her own with Radvanovsky, it’s a kind of emotional and vocal duel which both of them win.

Director Stephen Lawless has chosen to stage this intensely focused story and production in a setting (by Benoit Dugardyn) that resembles Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, a kind of surrounding area of rich brown wood that can reform itself to bring a scene into excruciating focus to become a bedroom, a chamber a prison cell, while above the doors is something resembling a circular balcony where crowds of courtiers, men and women in red and black, various factions, appear to peer down on the scene, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere for the characters, a place where no one is ever truly alone. This accurately reflects a political atmosphere that existed among Renaissance royalty and rulers in Tudor England, the beginnings of the police state.

In the staging, Lawless focuses the heart, no more than in an early scene, when Anne, sensing she may be in serious trouble of the fatal kind, imagines herself on the block, and goes through the graceful motions—arms outstretched, head on the block—of supplication and surrender. It makes your hair stand on end every bit as any of Radvanovsky’s vocal achievements.

Not only is Radvanosky’s voice a powerful dramatic tool—in the duel with Seymour, in her final scenes, in her glowing maternal powers when a child-princess Elizabeth is on stage but also in taking on the very fine bass Oren Gradus as Henry VIII. More traditional was the tenor Shelva Mukeria as Percy, a performer who has an appealing and grand voice but doesn’t quite achieve the charisma such a compelling swain should have.

This seems to me, at the very least, also a telling story about women and how deal with love and power and the desire for both. Throw into the mix the wonderful Claudia Huckle as Smeton—a so-called “pants” part in that she plays a young boy, a court singer smitten with Anna who ends up betraying her—and you have a grand powerful production of an opera that is bound up by one of opera’s first themes: power and its uses and misuses.
[gallery ids="100977,131597" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

Washington theater fans think they know Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Floyd King. This makes sense. After all, hundreds, maybe thousands, of Washington area theatergoers have spent plenty of time with him going back to the 1980s. It’s true that he’s had different faces in different roles, but we feel like we know him well enough. We’ve seen his Parolles, his Feste, his fool, all the people in “A Tale of Two Cities”, and the ale-loving delegate from Rhode Island in “1776”.

King greets his fans with a handshake in the lobby of the Lansburgh Theatre, where he and the rest of the Shakespeare Theatre Company is in rehearsal for a production of an adaptation of Gogol’s “The Government Inspector”, which runs through Oct. 28. King’s manner is casual, his face is recognizable and his voice is more so, modulated down to conversation.

King is pumped about the production, which is a true ensemble piece. It brings together a horde of actors with whom he’s worked with before. “That’s what I love about this, it’s like some sort of party, almost, or reunion, Nancy [Robinette], Ted [Sabin], Rich [Foucheoux], and all the others, including Hugh Nees, Derek Smith, Sarah [Marshall],” he says. “We’ve all been around a while and we all know each other.”

Michael Kahn is directing. About the only AWOL actor is Ted van Griethuysen, with whom King has worked many times. “We’re old friends,” King said of him. He was the fool to van Griethuysen’s Lear, and together they played the bumbling duo of Dogberry and Verges in “Much Ado About Nothing” like the two stumbling bums in “Waiting for Godot”, the absurdist play by Samuel Beckett.

Most theater folks will tell you that King is one of the area’s finest comic actors, especially in Shakespeare plays. Being a great comic actor is only an inch away from being a great tragedian, or as an actor once said, “Tragedy is easy, comedy is hard.”

King thinks recognizes that fine, wavering, trembling line. This is what King brings to the acting game. His voice alone can elicit laughter. He can also become becalmed, introspective, preen like a peacock on a dime.

After seeing King in so many plays, we often we feel as if we know him. Here are some things we don’t know.

Much of King’s career has been spent in Washington, but, surprisingly, he isn’t a Washingtonian. “I have a place in New York, and a house in the Poconos,” he said. “I go there for peace and quiet, and it’s easy to get to from New York.”

There’s one more thing we didn’t know about King.

“This is the last play I’ll be doing in Washington this season,” he said. “Yes, that’s it at least for this season. I haven’t contracted for any other roles. I haven’t taken any other offers.”

Shakespeare is King’s bread and butter, but he believes its time for a change of pace.

“I’ve done most of the parts I can suited for in Shakespeare,” said King. “I want to take stock. I want to relax a little. I want to go back to Minnesota, and San Francisco and other places. It’s not permanent. It’s just time for a change a little bit.”

This makes King’s appearance as a postmaster in “The Government Inspector” all the more special.
“I’m enjoying it,” he said.

You should too. In the meantime, we’ll all be “Waiting for Gogol,” for the return of the King. [gallery ids="100983,131801" nav="thumbs"]

Jeff Malet • September 17, 2012

“Hamlet” is one of Shakespeare’s best known and oft-quoted plays, involving political intrigue, tragic death and philisophical reflection. “Hamlet” comes to the Folger for a two-week run courtesy of London-based Shakespeare’s Globe. This production has already toured Britain extensively and begins its North American trip here in Washington, D.C.

It is a homecoming of sorts for Anglo-American actor Michael Benz in the role of Hamlet. Benz graduated in 2004 from Georgetown University with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and theology, followed by a degree from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, and Globe regular Bill Buckhurst co-directed. A fine cast features Carlyss Peer as Ophelia, Dickon Tyrrell as Claudius, and Miranda Foster as Gertrude.

Hamlet plays through Sept. 22 at Folger Theatre, at The Folger Shakespeare Library which is located at 201 East Capitol Street, SE, in Washington, DC. For tickets, call 202-544-7077, or order them online.

View our photos of Hamlet at the Folger by clicking on the photo icons below. [gallery ids="100972,131249,131257,131265,131273,131282,131291,131299,131307,131316,131324,131332,131241,131233,131366,131360,131171,131354,131181,131349,131191,131200,131208,131217,131225,131341" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

If you want to know something about American performing arts culture, look at the annual Kennedy Center Awards and who is honored. This year, it appears especially eclectic.

This is a trend for the Kennedy Center Honors that’s been moving apace ever since it embraced the arenas of pop music, including not only a Sinatra but giants of blues, rock and roll and country music.

This year, it is legendary bluesman George “Buddy” Guy and one of the loudest and best of the super rock groups (think the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and the Who), Led Zeppelin, and its surviving members, getting honored.

Also selected for a Kennedy Center Honors salute is late-night talk show host and comedian David Letterman (Johnny Carson being the forerunner in this sub-category), one of the finest classical ballerinas and dancers to grace the world of ballet and dance, Russian Natalia Makarova, and Dustin Hoffman, arguably one of the finest modern film actors in the last 50 years, to stand alongside the likes of Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino.

Makarova, who is 71, came to America in 1970 and assayed a memorable turn in “Giselle” for the American Ballet Theatre and built a memorable career.

Letterman is an icon, not perhaps in an artistic sense, but in the sense of his role as late night host, a more cerebral, ironic and even cool version than, say, the more put-upon Jay Leno.

Guy won six Grammy awards playing and making Blues music, a guitar player who oddly influenced a generation of British players (including members of Led Zeppelin) as well as Eric Clapton.

The Led Zeppelin rockers—Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and keyboardist John Paul Jones—have with this honor made it all the way up the “Stairway to Heaven.” Their rock and roll, often full of anthems, lengthy riffs and pure, powerful playing has lasted and so have they—still plying their trade as musicians and super-stars.

Hoffman we remember well in “The Graduate,” “Tootsie,” “Lenny,” “Rain Man,” “Midnight Cowboy,” “Kramer Vs. Kramer,” “All The Presidents Men” and so on and so on, still trucking, still working hard at 76, becoming a very funny man in the “Focker” movie, playing Ben Stiller’s father. He was also a memorable Willy Loman on stage in “Death of a Salesman.”

Georgetowner George Stevens, Jr., is once again producing the Kennedy Center Honors which will be held Dec. 2. Stevens himself is getting an honor this year. It’s been announced that the film director and founder of the American Film Institute will receive an honorary Oscar at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Board of Governors’ Dinner in Los Angeles Dec. 1—one day before the big show here in D.C.

Gary Tischler •

“The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity” by Kristoffer Diaz is quite a package. It carries a lot of stuff, themes, metaphors and even some poetry, plus a pyro-technic presentation that will wow you.

Down at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre, with director John Vreeke almost convincing theater folks to cheer, hiss and boo for the villains and heroes of this Pulitzer-Prize finalist play by a really gifted new writer, audiences become two audiences. Right there, that’s a very cool thing to happen: people actually get directed, they respond to the demands of the character and the play’s setting. For Woolly audiences, this is not your everyday happening: they’re comprise a tricky grab-bag of tastes, they want their crude moments wrapped in sophistication and their meaningful moments to have some edge, intellectual heft.

“Deity” has all of that, plus a staging that will knock your socks off, accompanied by loud music and noise, videos and punch and spark. It has Diaz’s gift for nailing the pow-pow and tech-tech, multi-culturalization of our more urban spaces in terms of language, its new, fractured phrases and words, its speed and rhythm.

But it’s about . . . wrestling.

So-called professional wrestling at that, that loud, booming, self-marketing sport of raw wrestling, quasi-street fighting, megaphone combination of star-power pull and bull, fake violence made to maybe turn graphic, its carny writ large, and there’s still one born every minute.

There’s precious little not to like here, except maybe the not surprising premise, which is that it’s really sad that wrestling is so duh-damn phony, false and inauthentic. This situation is a tragic one for at least one of the four protagonists in this play. The underlying theme, it struck me, was that wrestling is phony and false, as reflected by American culture (see reality shows, or don’t see). Might as well complain that the dust bowl has too much dust.

The tragic anti-semi-hero in this play is one Mace, a thin, wiry-muscled athletic small guy and fall guy, who understands the sheer beauty of wrestling, and furthermore, knows how to wrestle. But he’s been slated and fated to act the clown, the villain, the loser in wrestling’s every match, but he takes pride even in that, in doing that well. He hates his status but loves the world he lives in. “In wrestling, I make the other guy look good, that’s my job,” he says. “And there’s an art to that.” Mace, played with alarming, sometimes dangerous energy by the gifted Jose Joaquin Perez, understands his role—keep your mouth shut do your job. “I do the heavy lifting,” he says. That’s also what Mace does in this play—he’s the one that is the narrator, the story teller, like Sister Mary Ignatius, he explains it all to you, perhaps a little too much, and in fits and starts. “That’s not really what the story is” is not a phrase you want to hear too often in a play.

Mace is the fall guy for Chad Deity, a muscled, buffed, gleaming, grinning body of charisma. He’s a wrestling, celebrity deity, who can’t wrestle worth a spit, but he has the one thing that’s required: he’s a super-star. Both of them, each in their own way, work for EKO, the pitchman, marketer, owner, promoter and everything for something called THE WRESTLING, an accredited organization that holds power over all.

Enter one VP, a young magic man from the ghett-o, of Indian (as in India) origin who picks up hoops like its no big thing, speaks all the languages of the world, including street, hood and urban of everywhere, who cares not a fig for wrestling or its code, rules and, beauty and grace, its plots of bad guys and good guys and fake aches and hurts. But Mace thinks he’s his way up—and convinces EKO of it, too. Suddenly VP becomes the Fundamentalist, with his sidekick, the former Mace becoming a walking Mexican cliché called Che Chavez Castro, complete with sombrero. The play suddenly turns into a kind of serious farce about us and them, and given this week’s news, probably even a little more disorienting than it already is.

Nothing good can come of this—Deity remains a star, VP wants to undermine wrestling, and EKO can make dirty money and glory out of anything. But there are times in this production that you don’t even notice any of the deeper things going on—you’re too wrapped up in the ring that’s settled on stage from above, in the crashing fake noises as bodies fly around like missiles. It’s true that it is a smaller, more intimate ring. (Imagine all this in the Verizon Center, accompanied by thousands as opposed to a hundred or soin the theater.)

It’s, all said and done, exciting, dramatic, you discover again that wrestling, like reality shows, like politics, are amazingly theatrical. And Perez as Mace, the fast-talking Adi Hanash as VP, the amazing Shawn T. Andrew as Deity and veteran Michael Russotto as EKO are like foils and co-conspirators in a story about battles whose scripts have already been written. They make it worth your while.

Gary Tischler • September 13, 2012

Annie Baker is kind of sneaky, or at least she writes plays that feel like they’re written by a cat burglar.

Her plays—including “Body Awareness,” now receiving an affecting, imaginative staging at Theater J, as well as the hit, “Circle Mirror Transformation,” performed at the Studio two seasons ago—sneak up on you. They’re not so much disarming as surprising—like the moment in a story where someone wipes the dirt off the orphan’s face and finds out he is heir to the kingdom.

The way Baker operates is to set you up. She lets you make assumptions about characters, about what’s likely to happens next, then makes you throw the assumptions in the trash as you move along. It’s not that the assumptions are wrong, entirely, or that some things that you see coming from a distance doesn’t happen. It’s just that the seeming simplicity of her work and her use of language, her authenticity, if you will, seduces you into thinking that the play is simple, too, that it can’t be rescued from its apparent pitfalls. It’s complicated, and awkward, but it opens your eyes and heart at the end.

“Body Awareness” is an earlier work and centers around an event called “Body Awareness Week,” a celebration of just about politically correct cliché in the world, including the sin of irrefutable, high-minded dead-seriousness. At its center are Joyce and Phyllis, a lesbian couple in a household that also includes Jared, Joyce’s 21-year-old son from a failed marriage, who the couple believes is suffering from Asperger’s Syndrome, a belief which Jared bitterly and sometimes savagely fights. Phyllis, supremely confident in her view of the world, a professor at the local college, is running “Body Awareness Week,” with a kind of flinty assurance and cheerfulness resembling that of the Church Lady. Throw in a very laid-back, somewhat-on-the-make photographer named Frank Bonitatibus, who’s got a show in the festival of artsy photographs of naked women, and you’ve got a self-awareness-and-the-rumblings of discontent-week in the house.

As with “Circle Mirror,” the characters are flawed, and initially at least, not particularly likeable. They have annoying qualities at first blush: Phyllis, who preaches the gospel of gender and language PC, has a tendency toward the pedantic translating into a superior tone; Joyce oozes earth-mother protectiveness and accommodation; Jared, whether he has Asperger’s or not, is a bundle of treacherous emotions that are difficult to deal with and Frank, in his cool vest, thin-legged often-washed bluejeans and beard, is an aging hippy, his male libido barely in check. He is also a catalyst for friction between the two women and the source of manly advice (of the worst sort) for Jared, who’s never had a girlfriend and calls himself an auto-dactic.

In an hour and a half with no intermission (this was also the case for “Circle Mirror”), “Body Awareness” director Eleanor Holdridge deftly lets the play take its time and lets us almost move in with the characters and the sparse space of the set which is the cabin-like home owned by the couple. In the process, you get lots of talk, edgy combative talk, awkward painful talk spoken with a naturalness that turns the characters into people you start to care about, almost in spite of themselves.

That’s one of Baker’s gifts and concerns: how hard it is for people to community, to speak the truth, not because they’re hiding something, but because they don’t know how. So, you get glimpses of the “Body Awareness” events and occasions, you get to see Jared’s painful, needy world (Adi Stein is terrific in the part), you hear snatches of the couple’s history—Joyce explains that Phyllis is her first girlfriend, wheras “Phyllis came out in kindergarten, she’s always known who and what she was.”

Often funny, often painful are the prickly arguments between Phyllis and Frank and Phyllis’s hostility towards the “male eye,” i.e. art, pictures and anything that objectifies women. Susan Lynskey gives Phyllis a frustrating edge, as in an all-edges quality which is sort of like sun tan lotion warding off the sun, while Marybeth Wise manages to create a Joyce who is at once warm, expansive and completely awkward. In a weird way, it’s what makes her appealing, funny and sexy. Frank, being the dog he is, sees that right away. Michael Kramer lets you see Frank’s carelessness, his need to be liked, to worm his way in. It’s an aggressive kind of irresponsible charm. He stops just short of hitching up his jeans by the belt and strutting.

Yet, all this conflict has the effect of re-arranging feelings and illuminating who the characters really are in the end. They seem like a group portrait of Dorothy and her companions, breathless after the dangers of Oz, knowing at last their own hearts.

As a play, “Body Awareness” is a kind of small gift for an unspecified occasion, like a really fine, if not trendy, bottle of wine, to be savored. It’s at Theater J at the Jewish Community Center on 16th Street through Sept. 23. Go for it.

Gary Tischler •

It’s hard to doubt that somewhere in the course of a long career of jabbing Texas politicians and officials with the written-word equivalent of a cattle prod that some state senator or party chairman or Bush family hanger-on, with teeth-clenched respect, allowed that she had a set of male equipment, the highest compliment a man can pay a woman he’s not trying to sleep with, but who makes him nervous anyway.

Whatever the case, Molly Ivins didn’t need it. She had something better—flat-out, unrepentant courage.

Now, she’s got something almost as good to help keep her memorable wit and entirely human qualities alive: She’s got Kathleen Turner, who stars as Ivins in “Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-ass Wit of Molly Ivins,” now at Arena Stage’s Arlene and Robert Kogod Cradle Theater through Oct. 28.

It’s as if Ivins, who died in 2007 from breast cancer, was once again delivering political thunderbolts that made you proud, laugh, or squirm, depending on who you were, with her syndicated column, in a long career as a journalist from the New York Times to the Texas Observer.

Turner—movie star, outspoken supporter of liberal and progressive causes, mother, award-winning stage actress, and a still hot memory in the minds of many male movie goers of the 1980s for her performance as the femme fetale in the noirish “Body Heat”—is a perfect fit to march onstage and be Molly Ivins. If Turner’s famous voice—a rough shade deeper than in her “Body Heat” days, but just as impossible to ignore—has an equivalent somewhere, the words in Ivins’s column fit the bill, so it’s terrific that Turner’s speaking her words out loud. They’re going to echo loudly.

There’s a I’ll-do-it-my-way quality to both women. You can hear it over the telephone in an interview with Turner, or the way she tackled a glaring spotlight—“Whoa…can you give me a break here?”—as she sat down for a Newseum event, “An Evening with Kathleen Turner,” moderated by Shelby Coffey III, remembered here as the former Post Style section editor, and in the company of Margaret Engel, who co-wrote “Red Hot Patriot” with her twin sister Alison.

“That was fun,” she said of the Newseum event, “I like having fun.” Over the phone, the voice is down to a light roar, like a mother bear in a relaxed mode.

“I think we share some things. We have, I know, the same outlook, similar causes and political tendencies,” she said. “I am, if you did not know it, a member of People for the American Way. I am a chairman for Planned Parenthood. I support Amnesty International, among other causes.” Ivins wore her politics, which was liberal mixed in with a little verbal rage and lots of passion and in-your-face-humor.

Verbally, or on paper, both women share a common outspokenness, a big life story and a bigger-than-life-persona.

They could make an impression one way or another: Ivins with her 6-foot-1 presence and bright red hair; Turner with her physical sensuality, her voice, her acting chops, her movie star quality and directness. They both have led somewhat turbulent lives. It’s the nature of the beast when you become a movie star early on, although Turner objects to the “overnight” description. “I’d been working for quite a while. So, it’s not like I hadn’t been around,” she said of her, well, overnight rise to mega-stardom in “Body Heat.” “It was disconcerting, sure, with all the attention, the movie star thing, and it’s tough to handle.”

Her body of film work contains more unforgettable gems, which overrides the dross. You couldn’t get a better jump stardom jump start than “Body Heat,” “The Man With Two Brains” (in which she was as funny as Steve Martin), “Crimes of Passion,” “Romancing the Stone”, the hit woman to Jack Nicholson’s hit man in “Prizzi’s Honor,” and the remarkable movie about a marriage gone bad and mad, “The War of the Roses.”

“We [Michael Douglas and director Danny DeVito] were all proud of that,” she said. “That ending, the three of us had to fight for that, we battled with the studio on it and won.”In “Roses”, the movie took itself to where it was headed all along, and it was not a happy ending.

If you look for both women on YouTube, you see something else, the quality of sharp humor, insistence that attention must be paid. It’s mixed with tough honesty, evidence of big lives lived richly, with wind warnings.

“Molly could fill a room. She had presence. She cared passionately about politics. She had a huge heart,” Turner said of Ivins. “It’s important to me that I do her justice when I’m on that stage being her. The humor has to be there, and it is. Doesn’t matter where you are, people respond to that. I admired her immensely, no question.”

Ivins was no question, liberal-left, or as she’s quoted as saying in the press materials: “I am a liberal and proud of it. Fish gotta swim, and hearts gotta bleed.”

To her, work was everything: she left the New York Times, or was let go, depends who’s talking, to return to work in Texas, a base from which she blasted Texas politics and political figures.

Listen to Turner talk about the stage—where she was a triumphant Martha in a revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” by Edward Albee—you can hear some of the passion that Ivins must have felt when the words were rolling sharply and perfectly. “There is nothing like it,” she said of being on stage. “There’s a connection, a kind of conspiracy with the audience, that you are here at a moment that will never be repeated, that this is special, original, one-of-a-kind. I feel that way every night. It’s always fresh.”

For Ivins, Turner said she did not do any special research. “The words are already there, and you have to trust that. But I want the humor to be out there. I like making people laugh, making them crack up.”Things were not always top-of-the-world for Turner. In 1992 she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a debilitating disease which left her in constant pain. “I was told I might not walk again,” she said.

Still, she’s persevered. She remains in the ring, on stage, active in politics, and here in Washington, you can expect to see her at numerous events. And until the end of October, you can find her on stage at the Kogod Cradle, resurrecting Molly, making people think, making people laugh as the 2012 election campaign rolls on to its conclusion like a severe weather warning.
[gallery ids="102473,120593" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • August 20, 2012

It’s August, and in the course of a hot summer month 50 years ago, screen icon, sex symbol, tragic muse to many a play and novel, actress Marilyn Monroe died of an overdose, in somewhat mysterious and still speculated about circumstances. She was only 36 years old. Her ex-husband American baseball legend Joe DiMaggio for years afterwards brought flowers to her tomb in Hollywood.

The American Film Institute is commemorating the 50th anniversary of her passing with a special series of some of Monroe’s finest films through Sept. 16 at its Theatre and Culture Center in Silver Spring.

The selected films show off the character of Monroe’s gifts, talents, and charisma and hold a key to understanding the hold she has on American imagination. Some of the films may date in content and style, but her gifts continue to shine through.

Monroe was not the first sex symbol brought forth by films, nor the last. She was not America’s sweetheart or the most beautiful woman ever to grace the silver screen, but she was a kind of dream that men—and women, those that dream of fame, glory, stardom and celebrityhood and its contents and discontents—still dream. For men of pretty much all ages of that time—young boys, cads, millionaires, intellectuals and muscle boys, even a president—she was a kind of reality show. She had a kind of welcoming openness that made you think about idle prospects if only you might be sitting at the same lunch counter with her.

Her life was also something of a cautionary tale of the price of fame, how debilitating and crushing a burden it could become as it was for her. She married an American sports legend and an American intellectual and literary legend, which speaks to her need for adoration and intellectual respect. Neither worked out: Joe DiMaggio’s departure being brief, having mistakenly assumed that she could turn Marilyn into a good Italian boy’s housewife. The marriage with Arthur Miller lasted longer, and resulted in two offspring for Miller, the screenplay for “The Misfits” and the classic play “After the Fall.”

She was quotable, and stories and rumors surrounded her like a light mink coat. “What do you have on when you’re in bed?” she was asked. “The radio,” she replied. And, having entertained the troops in South Korea amid huge adulation, she told her husband the New York Yankees’ Joltin’ Joe, “You’ve never heard such cheering.” He replied: “Yes, I have.”

Among the AFI’s selected films: “Monkey Business,” a black-and-white dizzy comedy with Cary Grant, with whom she held her own in the banter and laughs department; “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” in which she was the gold-digginest of blondes alongside busty brunette Jane Russell, singing “Diamonds Are a Girls Best Friend”; “The Prince and the Showgirl,” in which she was an appealing showgirl to Laurence Olivier’s rather dour prince; “How to Marry a Millionaire,” standing and wiggling tall next to Betty Grable and Lauren Bacall; a classic and beautiful and affecting performance as a showgirl courted by a cowboy in “Bus Stop”; the dark thriller “Clash By Night”; the sharp, tightly written “The Asphalt Jungle,” in which she had a small but, as always, memorable part as a gun moll; and the unforgettable and by-now classic “The Misfits”.

Legends have grown up around this drama about a woman in Reno for a divorce, hooking up with modern cowboys Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift under the direction of John Huston.

By all accounts it was a tough shoot: Marilyn popping pills and late all-the-time; Clift not much better in his declining years; Gable dying of a heart attack soon after shooting’s end; Miller battling with Marilyn and Huston. It was perhaps Gable’s finest film, and he said as much after seeing rushes. The movie haunts and all the people are haunting and haunted by it. Another writer and I heard Eli Wallach, who played Gable’s buddy talk about it years ago over a lunch interview at Georgetown’s departed classic saloon and restaurant, Nathan’s. Wallach resurrected the film and Monroe before our eyes as if it were yesterday.

It was yesterday, 50 years ago.

For information on the Monroe movie commemoration, visit the AFI website.