Readers may recall Deborah Solomon’s recent profile of Arthur Miller for New York Times Magazine, in which Solomon (employing an entertaining degree of disingenuousness) probed into the playwright’s relationship with Marilyn Monroe.

That relationship is the subject of a new play by Miller, Finishing The Picture, which critic Terry Teachout reviews for today’s Wall Street Journal:

The cast included Stacy Keach, Linda Lavin and Matthew Modine, who together with their less well-known colleagues did what they could to enliven a show whose only distinction is that it isn’t quite as horrible as Mr. Miller’s last play about Marilyn Monroe, “After the Fall,” with which the Roundabout Theatre Company battered Broadway earlier this year. “Finishing the Picture” is, however, quite horrible enough, a bitter stew of score-settling and self-regard that left me wondering, not for the first time, how the author of “Death of a Salesman” could have stooped so low….

Needless to say, the playwright’s ex-wife is also among those present, though the actress playing her, Heather Prete, is never allowed to show her face (we do, however, see the rest of her naked body) or utter an intelligible word. As she grunts, mutters and screams, the other actors talk (and talk and talk) about her, emitting an endless stream of pseudo-poetic burble in the Miller manner: “What we had that was alive and crazy has been pounded into some hateful, ordinary dust.”

This is, of course, hardly more flattering than the Monroe-based character in After The Fall, of which Solomon wrote: “Who can doubt that Kitty is seriously disturbed? She pops pills, eats ice cream for breakfast and wanders the halls of the hotel without her clothes.”

Terry also describes knockout Chicago productions of Merry Wives of Windsor and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.