Two premieres — one world and one regional — make St. Paul a theater destination this weekend. They will be cutting the ribbon on "Working Boys Band" at History Theatre on Saturday. Just down the street at Park Square Theatre, "Behind the Eye" gives Minnesotans a first look at a play that's been around a few years.
'Behind the Eye'
Here's a life for you: Lee Miller was a Vogue model before she became a muse and model for Man Ray and other surrealists. That was before she went to Europe during World War II as a war photographer. And that was before she retired to the English countryside, exhausted by what she witnessed in the war. Still, in the final act of her life she became a respected gourmet cook and played host to many of the great artists who had worked with her previously.
Minneapolis-based playwright Carson Kreitzer takes on Miller's story in "Behind the Eye," which opens Friday at Park Square. Leah Cooper directs a cast that features Annie Enneking as Miller.
"It's a little intimidating to look at someone's life with such an epic scope," Kreitzer said. "She discovered and tasted and experienced everything there was to experience."
Kreitzer first came across Miller's story when she read a review of a 2005 biography. Miller, who grew up in upstate New York, posed nude for her father, an amateur photographer, before she caught the attention of Condé Nast in New York. He employed her as a model at Vogue magazine before she was 20 years old and for three years she was a highly sought fashion model. She went to Paris in 1929 with a letter of introduction to surrealist Man Ray. She became his muse, collaborator, lover and model.
Eventually, Miller got out from in front of the camera and started to exercise her own eye for photography. She returned to New York, opened her own studio, ran off with an Egyptian businessman, got bored, returned to Paris and met Roland Penrose, a British artist.
They were living together in England when World War II broke out. Miller became a news photographer for Vogue and documented the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris and, most famously, the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. Her colleague David Scherman, a Life magazine correspondent, photographed her in Hitler's bathtub in Munich.
She covered fashion and celebrities for Vogue after the war but retreated to the English countryside with Penrose. She slipped into depression and alcoholism even as she continued to host artistic royalty at her country home.
