Stage Door News
Stage Door News
The ten-week run of the United Solo Festival, featuring 150 productions from six continents, concluded on Sunday, November 22 at Theatre Row in New York, where the festival is a resident company. Beginning with its opening night on September 17, United Solo presented between two and five shows every day, in a vast array of categories. Over 80 of the shows were sold out, and nearly 30 were presented in the encore program, which features companies returning to the festival after successful performances in previous years.
Canadian Nonnie Griffin won the United Solo Award for Best International Show for “Marilyn - After”
United Solo is the world’s largest solo theatre festival, and has presented over 600 shows in its six years’ history. A number of scripts presented at the festival will be published and included in a special collection of Indie Theater Now, an online library for contemporary plays. Selected performers will also be invited to perform at the 2016 United Solo Europe, an annual showcase overseas, represented at the awards ceremony by Jakub Biegaj, the Managing Director of Theatre Syrena.
“Marilyn Monroe continues to fascinate people of all ages, even some 50 years after her death,” says Griffin. “No actress has ever held such a place in the affections of the public. To this day, people remain grieved and baffled by her sudden death in 1962. She was just 36 years of age.”
Griffin, who bears a striking resemblance to Monroe, brings her effortlessly to life in an evening of shocking truths, mitigated by touches of wit and humour, for which Monroe was famous.
In the play, Marilyn is depicted as an older person, recounting her story, because – as she says – she never got the chance to be her older self. As someone who always loved older people, she names some of the many she was close to and who meant so much to her during her lifetime. Marilyn comes back from beyond to tell her audience the true facts about her life: her lack of any real parenting, the many foster homes, the sexual demands made on young actresses in those days, her famous nude calendar, the men in her life, and much more.
Nonnie Griffin has long empathized with Marilyn Monroe. “I, too, had a voluptuous figure as a young blonde woman, and men were constantly after me. It became very confusing and almost scary to deal with all the constant attention,” she says. She recalls a vivid dream, in which she told Monroe, “I want to be your real friend.” To which Monroe replied, “Thank you, Nonnie. I need one.”
A veteran of Canadian theatre and Andrew Allan’s fabled CBC Stage radio series, Nonnie Griffin is indelibly remembered for her appearances in such Toronto productions as Hello, Dolly!, Waiting for the Parade, Tremblay’s The Impromptu of Outremont, Ring Round the Moon, and The Sea – for which she was named Best Actress of 1977. She is also the author of Sister Annunciata’s Secret, based on an actual incident, in which she plays six characters. Her play brought audiences at the 2012 Edinburgh Festival to their feet and high praise from critics.
She is also the author of SHOWBIZ and other addictions, published by Mosaic Press and endorsed by writer Timothy Findley, who called her “magical”.
After extensive research, it took Griffin about eight months to write her new play about Marilyn Monroe. Her sources included Marilyn Monroe Private and Confidential by Michelle Morgan; The Marilyn Encyclopedia by Adam Victor; The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe by Donald Wolfe; and The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe by Randy Taraborrelli. The play previewed in Toronto in 2013, inspiring one patron to write that it brought a chill to her, as though Marilyn herself had appeared before them.
Photo: Nonnie Griffin.
2015-11-25
New York: Nonnie Griffin wins an award at the United Solo festival for "Marilyn - After"