an INTIMATE benefit
By Albert Meglin
Miss Monroe Explains
Two Sisters Sitting On A Bench,
Resting From All The Excitement
Miss Monroe Explains: With her life and career falling apart, Marilyn Monroe decides to make a tape recording, in which she will at last divulge a secret kept from husbands, psychiatrists, everyone. A secret impossibly unrealistic, and patently childish, yet once exposed becomes recognizable as a basic truth in a fragile psychological make-up, revealing the terrible, unresolved vulnerability that underlay her glamorous life on the screen.
Two Sisters Sitting On A Bench, Resting From All The Excitement: This one act-drama (in multiple short scenes) concerns two elderly sisters, Rose and Marjorie, at a small-town crafts fair, while they confront issues of old age, mutual dependency, and vast emotional need. Through a series of minor incidents – the purchase of some crockery; the “purloined” recipe; the imagined attentions of an itinerant art dealer – rose and Marjorie reveal their bristling separateness and abrasive individuality. They also reveal, however, their desperate fear of isolation as their lives more toward inevitability.
PLAYWRIGHT
ALBERT MEGLIN
Albert Meglin’s writing career began with television’s “Golden Age” of drama. More than two dozen half-hour, full-hour, and 90-minute TV plays, including the very first piece of writing of any kind he had done, were sold to and produced by CBS, NBC, and ABC Television. Anthology shows for which he wrote include Matinee Theatre, U.S. Steel Hour, The Nurses, Look Up And Live, and Confidential for Women. Early in his career, a full-length play was produced commercially on the Toronto, Canada stage.
In recent years, Al has concentrated on writing for the stage. His credits include: The Band Takes A Short Break, winner of playwriting contest sponsored by Great Neck local access TV station; At the Boathouse in Central Park, produced in showcase Off-Off-Broadway; The Blue Kangaroo, finalist, New Hampshire College new play contest; and The Visiting Room, Critics Choice – 22nd Annual Samuel French Short Play Festival, and Off Season.
His plays Emily, on her Glider, The Band Takes a Short Break, Two Sisters Sitting On A Bench, Resting From All The Excitement, and Two Old Men Talking in a McDonald’s in Plainview, have been developed and presented in workshop by Stageplays Theatre Company (Stageplays®).
In 2009, Al's short plays The Biggie, Stalking Eugene Onegin, W. 57th St, 1BR, Sunny Steal, On A Westside Roof, Miss Monroe Regrets, On an Uptown Lottery Line, In a Riker’s Island Waiting Room, and Trailer Trash, were published by Stageplays in a two-volume set: The "Biggie" and Other One-Act Plays, Vol. I, and Testosterone and Other One-Act Plays, Vol. II.
Al Meglin has worked in the fields of newspapers and advertising, and has been a teacher of English in the New York City high schools. He has taught writing at Hofstra University, and has written film and drama criticism for Long Island weeklies. Mr. Meglin resides in Malverne, New York.
CAST LIST
Miss Monroe Explains
Annie Kozuch
Two Sisters Sitting On A Bench, Resting From All The Excitement
Marian Seldes
Frances Sternhagen
Peter Von Berg, Narrator
