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.
Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is a spoken and sung new work by poet, essayist, and scholar Anne Carson that reconsiders the stories of two iconic women—Marilyn Monroe and Helen of Troy—from their point of view.
Starring actor Ben Whishaw and soprano Renée Fleming, and intimately and powerfully staged by director Katie Mitchell in The Shed’s 500-seat Griffin Theater, Norma Jeane Baker of Troy explores who has the right to tell a woman’s story, and how those stories reverberate through our culture.
“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,”- Anne Carson
