Miller play depicts Monroe’s woes

Arthur Miller’s troubled marriage to Marilyn Monroe informed his 1964 play “After the Fall” and he apparently has taken further inspiration from it in a new one, “Finishing the Picture,” that he hopes to have staged later this year.

A recent reading at Manhattan’s Harold Clurman Theater “went very well,” Miller said Friday from his home in Connecticut. “I think we’ll get it on sometime next fall. It depends on the casting.”

Sources who attended the reading told the New York Post that events in “Finishing the Picture” loosely paralleled the making of “The Misfits,” Monroe’s last film, which Miller wrote. She was having a breakdown, taking sedatives and was barely able to finish shooting.

Miller, 87, emphasized that he is driving at more than an exhumation of a troubled time in his life. “It’s a play about the influence of power on human affairs.”

-- Mike Boehm