A Beautiful Child: Tru Confessions

Published in 1980 as part of the collection of essays titled Music For Chameleons, Truman Capote's A Beautiful Child was a remembrance of a time 25 years earlier, when he spent a day with Marilyn Monroe following the funeral of her acting teacher, Constance Collier.  At the time the 30-year-old Capote was primarily known as the author of Other Voices, Other Rooms, which featured a boyish, but sexually provocative photo of himself on the dust jacket that, to a segment of society, made him the object of the same kind of fascination that Monroe was to the country as a whole.  Three years later he would publish Breakfast At Tiffany's, featuring the character of Holly Golightly, which he modeled after actress Carol Grace.  Perhaps it was this lazy day, when they strolled Manhattan's East Side, drank warm champagne, discreetly discussed her newest love and less discreetly discussed some of Hollywood's elite, that inspired Capote to (unsuccessfully) push for Monroe to be cast as Holly in the film version.

A Beautiful Child is written in pages of scripted dialogue linked together by first person narration; certainly a temptation for mounting it on stage.  Unfortunately, the Fringe production of A Beautiful Child, which is a slightly edited version of the complete Capote text, shows little justification for lifting the two from the page and the fifty minute piece lacks the power to intrigue that was such a powerful gift possessed by its two protagonists.

Director Linda Powell doesn't try and draw impersonations from actors Maura Lisabeth Malloy and Joel Van Liew; a good move which prevents fixating the audience's attention on the accuracy of their mimicry.  The problem is that neither come up with portrayals that provide equally interesting characters.  Van Liew's Capote is a glib, fast-talking New Yorker; likable, smart and funny, but rather unremarkable.  Malloy's Monroe seems too jaded and emotionally secure to be the character Collier describes as "a beautiful child" who possesses "this presence, this luminosity, this flickering intelligence," and nowhere in her interpretation are there hints that she's playing, as Capote describes her, "some sort of platinum sex-explosion."

And with the brunette actress wearing a black dress, dark glasses and a black chiffon scarf completely covering her hair, as Capote describes her in the text, Ms. Malloy bears more of a resemblance to Jackie Kennedy than Marilyn Monroe.

Capote quotes Collier as saying that what Marilyn Monroe has, "could never surface on the stage.  It's so fragile and subtle, it can only be caught by the camera."  And perhaps that's the difficulty in dramatizing A Beautiful Child.  What Monroe had, and to an extent what Capote had, might appear far more vivid when imagined by the reader through the author's words.