Carson Kreitzer's "Behind the Eye' (1st review)

Most of us tiptoe through life carefully and cautiously. The immensely talented, immensely beautiful and immensely driven American model and photographer Lee Miller (1907-1977) raced through life at top speed, forsaking all of society's customary safety nets, like family, community, a committed spouse and enduring friendships.

Her ace in the hole was her magnetic beauty and her willingness to exploit it in order to wangle herself into the company of celebrated arts figures, from the publisher Condé Nast (who pulled her away from an oncoming car in Paris traffic and put her on the cover of Vogue) to the artist-photographer Man Ray (whom she served as assistant, model, lover, muse and collaborator) to Charlie Chaplin to Picasso to the novelist Colette.

From the time she arrived in Paris as a teenager in 1925, Miller reinvented herself repeatedly, evolving from chorus girl to model to actress to photographer to war correspondent to gourmet chef. Like Woody Allen's Zelig, she seemed to possess an uncanny knack for finding and positioning herself at the world's center stage, whether the avant-garde Paris art scene of the "'20s, World War II, the liberation of Buchenwald, Hitler's bathtub or the war orphan hospitals of postwar Vienna (a scene, she claimed, that she passed on to Graham Greene as inspiration for his classic novel and film, The Third Man).

Home wrecker

Along the way Miller acquired her first husband, the much older Cairo businessman Aziz Bey, by wrecking his first marriage and driving his first wife to suicide, then took up with and married the English Surrealist painter and curator Roland Penrose (who tells her, in Carson Kreitzer's Behind the Eye, "You burn my fingertips— the insides of my nostrils").

But married or single, no man (or even motherhood at 40) ever successfully lassoed Miller into a domestic lifestyle; "I have to keep moving or I'll die," the stage Lee explains. Or as one male character puts it in Behind the Eye, Miller was "that Helen on which so many ships were hopelessly beached."

Even in death this femme fatale continues to accumulate besotted male admirers: In a 2008 review of a Miller retrospective at the Art Museum, BSR's Robert Zaller (who rarely has a good word for anyone other than Karl Marx, Albert Barnes, Dmitri Shostakovich and me) declared, "If there's a true American heroine of the 20th Century, she's it in my book." (Click here.)

A question about breasts

Miller's influence in many of her roles was not insignificant; as Zaller observed in a 2010 BSR essay, Man Ray found no shortage of female models after Miller left him in 1932, "but none who inspired him as Lee did, and certainly none who brought out such raw and uncensored emotion in him." (Click here.) But on most of her stages Miller was either an observer or a supporting player— a Rosencrantz to someone else's Hamlet.

Carson Kreitzer's Behind the Eye places this intriguing woman, for perhaps the first time, at the center of her own story while shifting her more celebrated friends and lovers to the periphery. Although the Gas & Electric Arts production provides four other actors playing multiple roles, the seemingly indefatigable Kittson O'Neill gamely occupies the stage for the play's entire 100-plus minutes (no intermission, either).

In the play's opening line, O'Neill as Miller defiantly asks the audience, "Did you come here expecting to see my breasts?" With this single sentence, Kreitzer establishes Miller as a no-nonsense woman who understands very well what attracts men to her but refuses to take shit from anyone. But it also reflects a problem: The script presumes from the get-go that Lee Miller is a fascinating figure but never really dramatizes what's fascinating about her, aside from paeans uttered by her admirers as well as a great deal of expository talk about her travel and adventures.

Childhood trauma

From a dramatic standpoint, the critical question here should be: What drove Lee Miller, and why should we care? The first part of that question is answered early in the play: Miller was raped by a relative at age seven and infected with syphilis, and her father subjected her to nude photo sessions when she was ten. None of this is shown on stage, of course; Miller tells us what happened, leaving us to reflect how a traumatic childhood shaped her into a restless seeker of truth through art and photography.

"I lived!" Miller declares triumphantly at the play's end, notwithstanding the undercurrent of anger that's discernible throughout the play. "I was the best Lee Miller I could possibly have been."

Search for a moral

But what is the moral of her story? That childhood trauma sometimes generates positive side effects? That suffering is a necessary element of great art? That (as Miller puts it in the play), "Being beautiful has its uses"? Kreitzer's script doesn't delve very deeply into such questions, preferring instead to gush (like the men in Miller's life) at this vision of a dynamic and gorgeous liberated woman.

There's much to be said for plays about real people, if only because they remind us that truth is often stranger than fiction. Carson Kreitzer, who specializes in "real life" plays, has found in Lee Miller an engaging vehicle with which to explore the nature of art, photography and journalism— subjects that mainstream theaters usually avoid— and director Lisa Jo Epstein and her Gas & Electric Arts company deserve credit for bringing it to the stage. God knows they've provided plenty of food for thought, even if they haven't quite provided the elements of a genuine drama.♦


To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.