Strawhead - Debut and Aftermath

Debut and Aftermath

In January 1986, Strawhead was debuted in full at the Actors Studio, with actor and playwright John Jiler playing Mr. Charles. American playwright and critic Bonnie Greer, who shared a close relationship to Mailer and reviewed an initial version of the play, stated that what Mailer put on stage ultimately was not Monroe. Rather, the play was more about "chronicling all Mailer's life as The Great, White, Male Heterosexual, "Big Daddy", "The Man.""

In April 1986, it was first reported that Mailer's daughter Kate Mailer was added to the cast in the lead role. The choice was in interesting one since the play characterizes a fictional interaction between Monroe and Mailer and an early draft had a clichéd Monroe giving a blowjob to the Mailer-interviewer character. In explaining Mailer's choice of casting his 23-year-old, unknown actress daughter in his play, Mailer stated, "She was the best prep-school actress I'd ever seen." To bring publicity to the play and to sell the Vanity Fair magazine, Kate Mailer appeared on the April 1986 Vanity Fair cover as the Marilyn Monroe character in Strawhead. In October 1987, the New York Times describe Kate Mailer's portrayal of Monroe as teenage punk rocker who is "less identified with her role."

After the 1986 performances, the commercial performance of Strawhead all but disappeared. In her 2005 book The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, author Sarah Churchwell notes that Strawhead was a commercial failure.

In April 2008, Harvard University received the papers of the co-author of the play, Richard G. Hannum, formerly a resident of Sebastian, Florida. Included with those papers were correspondence with Mailer and drafts and final script for Strawhead. The drafts and final script evidence the literary techniques used in Strawhead and Mailer's efforts to continually improve his own writing for Strawhead and that of Hannums. Importantly, they convey research and teaching about how the style and substance of Strawhead was developed through layers of revision.