Burnt at the Stake Yet Again - Jean Seberg's Life as Musical Comedy

Burnt at the Stake Yet Again -- Jean Seberg's Life as Musical Comedy

Tonight I am going to the theater. This is more difficult than usual -- I am going alone, I have been teaching all day, and I am eight months pregnant. I am going to see a musical about a dead woman. If in actual life this woman had not died, there would have been no evening of theater.

The songwriter of this musical has said, "The original idea of a musical based on the life of Jean Seberg was mine -- I started writing it the week after she died."

I walk slowly, I waddle. I am carrying a girl child. I am doubly female. I am going to this event because four men -- the composer, the songwriter, the dramatist, and the director -- want to tell me something about this dead woman.

I am late getting to my seat. The foyer is empty. A tall dark man with a very worried look is speaking in an animated voice to someone dressed as a technician. The tall man suddenly lurches past me, brushing my arm but not seeing me.

Inside the theater the audience is chattering -- the show is late. Preview night. Even the National Theatre has these problems. I realize that the tall man who brushed past me is the composer, Marvin Hamlisch. I hope that my bladder lasts through the interval.

During the interval, after my trip to the toilet, I watch Marvin. During the first act he has been installed at the back of the house, near my seat. Now he is speaking to several technicians. He is worried, he is sweating. He is the expectant father. This preview must be failing him in some respect. Two nights before, enveloped in an aura of New York cool, he had been interviewed on television about Jean Seberg, the American actress who starred in Otto Preminger's Saint Joan and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless and who committed suicide in Paris in 1971. His actual references to Jean were minimal -- "unusual but fascinating topic for a musical, groundbreaking, innovative, we hope, symbol of the American Dream." My memory of this interview is subsumed by the composer singing what he hopes...