Carson Kreitzer's "Behind the Eye' (3rd review)

Lee Miller (1907-1977) was one of the 20th Century's most tantalizing women. Born in the backwater of Poughkeepsie, New York, she became a leading New York fashion model in her teens and then, bored with this success, the mistress, muse, and collaborator of the Surrealist master Man Ray a few years later in Paris. Picasso painted her; Cocteau filmed her; Chaplin entertained her.

After making a brilliant debut in her own right as a photographer, Miller disappeared for several years as the wife of a wealthy Egyptian businessman, Aziz Bey, only to produce some of the most haunting battlefield images of World War II as a photographer attached to the 83rd U.S. Infantry Division and, insouciant as ever, being photographed herself having a good scrub-down in Hitler's bathtub in the dying days of the Third Reich.

Putting down the camera for good, Miller took up yet another career as a master chef, but cooked only for friends and visitors, living out the final 30 years of her life in obscurity as the wife of the British painter and critic Roland Penrose.

Gun to the head

No one who met Lee as a young woman, it seems, could resist her, and she didn't withhold her charms from many. Willful and mercurial, she lived life on her own terms even by the standards of interwar Paris.

When she left Man Ray, he photographed himself with a gun to his head, but didn't pull the trigger, instead producing a series of works depicting Lee's mocking lips against a blue sky that would become one of the Surrealist era's signature images. Aziz Bey's wife Nimet did commit suicide when she heard of her husband's infatuation with Lee, who later cost Aziz his fortune.

Plainly, this was a dangerous lady to know.

Childhood trauma

One thing that perhaps attracted people to Lee was the sense of vulnerability that underlay her erratically high spirits. Although few people knew it, she'd been raped at the age of seven by a relative, and, infected with gonorrhea as a result, forced to undergo a year of nightmarish medical treatment that permanently stigmatized her.

Her father, too, though a pillar of the local community, liked to photograph her nude until adolescence. It doesn't take much to imagine the effect of this attention on Lee's sexual identity and sense of self-worth, as well as its determinative effect on her career. From childhood through early adulthood, she was the constant object of the camera's eye; she could gain a measure of control only by turning that eye on others.

Nonetheless, Lee never saw herself as a victim, and it would be a great mistake for us to do so. She lived avidly and projected for others the sense of life as a gift to be used to the full.

Opposite of a victim

If Lee demanded much of others, she spared nothing in herself. She was a high-wire act, and if she crashed and burned in later life, she left little unattempted.

She made herself, in short, into the very opposite of a victim: a heroine who perched on danger and dared it to do its worst. If there was trauma at the source, she made it work for her in very remarkable ways.

Distilling such a figure into the compass of a stage play is a daunting task, but Carson Kreitzer's Behind the Eye in large measure succeeds, thanks to a strong and focused performance by Kittson O'Neill and an inventive, kaleidoscopic staging by Lisa Jo Epstein, the artistic director of Gas & Electric Arts.

Perfect body

Kreitzer's Lee wastes no time getting down to business: "Did you come here expecting to see my breasts?" is her opening line. Indeed, Lee had the most celebrated breasts of the century before Marilyn Monroe's, and, unlike Marilyn's, they were fully photographed by Man Ray: not large, but perfectly sculpted and contoured to her classically perfect body.

Lee observes later that Ray preferred torso shots, which cut off both the head (intelligence and personality) and the arms and legs (locomotion, independence). She learned much from Ray, but when he'd given her everything she needed, she put the rest of her body firmly back in the frame: She walked out.

Framing became very important to Lee. Truth was always fluid for her—"Biography is a lie," Kreitzer has her remark, and, later, "History is a lie"— and so, too, in its way, was the camera, which arrested life's flow but did so in a way that made the artificiality of all representation transparent: a focusing, an arrangement, a petrification of the real that paradoxically intensified dynamism by freezing it.

Broken window

One of Lee's most famous photographs— my own favorite— shows a desert landscape seen through a broken window: a frame within a frame. Simon Harding's set, which features a single, hanging frame high above the stage, appears to reference this shot: It's a blank eye suspended in space, both receiving the impress of reality and allowing it to pass through at the same time.

Harding's frame hangs above a stage otherwise empty but for a high arch to the rear from which a tumble of boxes issues, strewn partway across the stage. The boxes suggest the hidden compartments of personality beneath the candor of the inquisitive lens; they were also the storage of Lee's art, which she refused to exhibit after its initial appearance in magazines and which her son Anthony discovered only after her death.

Epstein stages a parade of mirrors at one point, too— objects that simultaneously reveal, distort and ultimately conceal. In the same way, Lee both exposes herself and rejects our gaze; front and center though she is throughout the show, she refuses to let us get a fix on her.

Faithful in her fashion

The other major figures in Lee's life— Ray, Picasso, Penrose, Aziz, her wartime colleague and lover David Scherman, and her one great female friend, Tanja Ramm— revolve through her life in turn, each with his or her own perspective on her, and all complex figures in their turn. Their interaction with Lee brings out facets of her personality that elude the monologue that carries most of the play.

Lee is by turns assertive, provocative, ironic and occasionally despairing when she addresses the audience, and she's at pains to assure us that, though she's a frank and loving girl at heart, we can't understand her. Seeing her play off the figures in her life, and watching their frequent frustration and anger at her, actually helps to humanize her.

Through it all, they seemed to have remained faithful to her, and she to them, at least in her fashion. Aziz perhaps sums it up best at the end when he says that, although Lee has ruined him, he would have missed the best of life without her.

Cutting-edge company

It's that charm and capaciousness that, perhaps inevitably, eludes the script. Lee could give great happiness. She just couldn't keep much of it for herself.

The ensemble cast— Charlotte Northeast, Allen Radway, James Stoyer and Robb Hutter— handle their multiple roles with aplomb; Hutter's Aziz and Picasso are particularly good. Lighting, costumes and sound all blend seamlessly. Gas & Electric Arts joins Pig Iron and EgoPo as a cutting-edge area company that, with relatively slender means, offers innovative fare at a high level of professionalism.♦


To read another review by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.