Renée Fleming returns to the stage staring opposite Ben Whishaw (Skyfall, The Crucible) in Anne Carson’s powerful new performance piece, Norma Jeane Baker of Troy. This spoken and sung work is staged by “Britain’s greatest living theatre director” (The Guardian), Katie Mitchell.
It is 1964. An office manager has hired one of his stenos to come in at night and type out his translation of Euripides’s Helen, but his obsession with the recently dead Marilyn Monroe kidnaps the translation.
Poet, essayist and playwright Carson says, “The #MeToo movement has given us new ways to think about female icons like Helen or Marilyn Monroe, new ways to revolve the traditional male version of such events 360 degrees and find different, deeper sorrows there.”
Nora Jeane Baker of Troy runs at NYC’s Hudson Yard’s new performance centre The Shed’s The Griffin Theater through 19 May.
