A lack of professional polish hinders this ambitious but frustrating new work from By the Word Productions currently playing in the Crows Studio Theatre.

In the tradition of Schiller’s Mary Stuart or Stetson’s The Meeting, playwright Franca Miraglia imagines a fictional meeting between non-fiction characters. The jumping off point is a passage from Arthur Miller’s autobiography wherein he wonders whether a face to face encounter between his wife Marilyn Monroe and her brutal posthumous biographer Norman Mailer might have humanized her and avoided some of the more unkind characterizations made by the man who never actually met her before writing about her. It’s an intriguing premise with built-in complex personalities and complicated dynamics. Miller’s relationship to Monroe as a person beyond her persona is rich storytelling ground but Miraglia seems far more interested in the simplistic villainy of Mailer and the imagined conflict he theoretically could have brought with him to the couple’s already fraught home.

Misha Harding delivers the production’s strongest performance as an unravelling Marilyn, confined to her dressing room as she attempts to wrestle control of the evening with the only power she has- her own presence. The concept of “Marilyn” as a third party in Norma Jeane’s life is one of Miraglia’s most intriguing ideas as the character gestures towards an iconic wig and refers to “her”. However, the tension of whether Miller sees her as Marilyn or Norma is never really investigated as the outside conflict of the pacing gorilla in their sitting room interferes.

As played by a bombastic Mark Rittinger, Mailer is a pathetic buffoon, a sort of retroactive stand-in for a modern incel, lamely challenging intellectual heartthrob Miller at every opportunity, supposedly for indirectly making him feel bad about himself. That unmissable twenty first century perspective infiltrates the play unhelpfully in both text and subtext, sometimes manifesting as hindsight-heavy judgement of the characters’ circumstances and at least once appearing as a bizarre joke about Twitter in this play set in 1957.

Awkward blocking that cheats out far too much and stilted delivery riddled with line flubs does little to elevate the material but ultimately the failure here is in Miraglia’s interest in using these iconic figures to make modern points rather than tell a human story.