Strawhead - Development

Development

In 1967, Norman Mailer had adapted his 1955 novel The Deer Park for an Off Broadway production. Thirteen years later, in 1980, Norman Mailer's agent informed Mailer that Richard Hannum, then a Manhattan roommate of Godspell creator John-Michael Tebelak, American Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Stephen Hunter, and film director and composer Tom O'Horgan were interested in a stage adaptation of Mailer's 1980 book, Of Women and Their Elegance. Mailer agreed to work on the play since it would be a pleasant diversion: "Novel writing is a lonely business. Lonely business quickly becomes grim. In theater you're working with people. The climate is a lot warmer."

The stage adaptation was Mailer's second foray into the theater behind the The Deer Park adaptation. The play takes its title from an FBI code name for Monroe. According to Mailer, Strawhead represents "(Marilyn's) ironic, whimsical, tortured way of thinking." Mailer sees the fictional Monroe character in the play as "having an immensely dialectical mind; no sooner does she have a thought, than she comes on its opposite. That's the way life presents itself to her - in contrasts and sudden shifts."

In January 1981, Hannum and Hunter were listed as the producers of the play and O'Horgan was listed as the director. At that time, Mailer had hoped that the play would open on Broadway in the spring 1981 or the fall 1981, but had not yet cast the Monroe character. In addition, Hannum still was working on the play construction and Mailer was working on the play dialogue from his writing desk in Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn.

To move the script along, Mailer presented the beginnings of Strawhead for critique to the Actors Studio Playwright And Directors Unit, an exclusive group to which Mailer belonged. The early draft had a clichéd Monroe giving a blowjob to the Mailer-interviewer character. In response to former Marilyn Monroe roommate and Academy Award winning actress Shelley Winters blasting Mailer's effort, Mailer rewrote the part to be a burly Maileresque feminist who burst into the play from the audience.