In bringing these two voices together, the play suggests that literature, conversation, and the patient work of language have long helped Americans see themselves more clearly. Beneath fame, ambition, and public performance remains something quieter and more enduring—the human search for authenticity—a search that continues to shape the American story.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
CARL SANDBURG
A life shaped by listening.
In the play, he is 84 years old.
MARILYN MONROE
A life shaped by being seen.
Marilyn is 35 years old, one year after
her divorce from Arthur Miller.
Print Edition Cover
ON THE THREE ACTS
This play unfolds across three stages of light: late afternoon, twilight, and early evening just before the stars appear.
It begins with brightness — the kind the world recognizes best: the brightness of image, of recognition, of being seen by others before we fully learn how to see ourselves.
Two figures meet in this light.
One has spent a lifetime listening to a nation’s language, gathering its voices and shaping them into poetry. The other has lived under the spotlight of a world that often confuses brightness with understanding.
The play imagines Carl Sandburg and Marilyn Monroe meeting late in Sandburg’s life at his home, Connemara, in North Carolina. Only fragments of that encounter remain. What passed between them was never fully known.
This play imagines that conversation.
It explores what might happen when two lives, shaped by very different kinds of public attention, sit quietly together in a room where performance is no longer necessary.
Between them rests a small notebook — unfinished pages, thoughts still forming, poems not yet certain of their voice.
The first act focuses on image: how easily a person becomes a reflection in others’ eyes.
The second act shifts inward, toward the authority of thought — the moment when a person recognizes the difference between the self that survives and the self that dares to speak.
The third act concerns consequences — what remains after the room falls silent, what words endure when the brightness fades.
