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Playwright Jonathan Ceniceroz has a new work in progress that aims his imaginative and creative light on Natalie Wood’s death.
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Playwright Jonathan Ceniceroz |
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What really happened to Natalie Wood?
By Sue Harrison
Banner Staff
Jonathan Ceniceroz’ latest play, “The Drowning of Natalie Wood,” looks back to that dark November night in 1981 when Academy Award-winning actress Natalie Wood slipped beneath the surface of the cold waters off Catalina Island and drowned.
The New Provincetown Players continues its winter reading series with Ceniceroz’ play at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 28, at The Provincetown Theater, 238 Bradford St., Provincetown.
Tickets are available at the door ($5) or remotely ($6) by phone at (508) 487-9793 or online at ptowntix.com.
What happened to Natalie Wood has been the subject of books and movies, and discussion has swirled around her stormy relationship with twice-wed husband Robert “RJ” Wagner and her many rumored affairs. At 43, her career was in eclipse while RJ’s was booming with “Hart to Hart” on television. They took their yacht, The Splendour, to Catalina Island and invited Christopher Walken, Wood’s co-star in “Brainstorm,” to join them. After they moored in Isthmus Cove, the facts begin to fade. It’s agreed that the three of them and the captain went into town for dinner, drank several bottles of champagne and caused a bit of a scene before heading back to the boat. After that, Walken reportedly went to bed. The captain supposedly saw the dinghy was gone and thought she had taken it out to look at the stars as he claims she had done before. Others say she had a life-long terror of open water and would not have done that.
The captain told Wagner the dinghy was gone and Wagner called the authorities for a search when she couldn’t be found. The next morning she was found floating with the dinghy nearby. There was talk of sexual liaisons and of arguments between Wagner and Walken late the night she died.
The medical examiner concluded that Natalie may have been retying the dinghy to keep it from banging noisily on the boat’s side when she slipped and fell. She was wearing a flannel nightgown, knee socks and a red parka that quickly filled with 30 to 40 pounds of seawater and kept her from being able to climb into the dinghy. She was also legally drunk.
Ceniceroz says he remembers listening to a tape of the radio station report of the death and becoming fascinated. Then, as now, the public couldn’t get enough of celebrities’ lives — or deaths.
“It was similar to Marilyn Monroe’s death but this happened on a yacht with two other celebrities and one paid employee,” he says. “It was a condensed box. I was greatly interested.”
It was poignant, he adds, since she was at such a crossroads in her life. To die at 43 with so much success behind her and so few prospects in front of her added to the drama.
“It was the end of an era. She was a movie star in the truest sense. Like Elizabeth Taylor, they both came of age in the factory system.”
Stars were carefully crafted and created by the movie studios to flame public interest in their films, he says. That creation covered their public lives as well. What resulted was a perception of perfection that was always slightly at odds with the real human.
“They were plagued by all the social demons that plague everyone else but theirs were writ on a larger canvas. They were living a larger drama.”
As a youngster that large life appealed to Ceniceroz, as did the stars’ ability to jet around the world and be received anywhere and everywhere they went. Those large lives with dramatic ups and down were part of what caught his creative eye about the drowning.
He talks about that night.
“There was a love triangle on the yacht,” he says, referring to Wood and Walken. “She had a record of bedding down with costars and directors. She had always been trained to appease men and their egos [learned from her mother who groomed her for child stardom]. She had a long-term ‘friendship’ with Frank Sinatra beginning when she was 16 and he was in his 50s.”
Still, the real Natalie was fun, down-to-earth despite a fast lifestyle, he says.
When he decided to write a play about her death, he did a lot of research and then chose to present the play as a triptych, a story told in three ways or from three viewpoints.
“I decided to explore dramatically the three prevailing rumors of how she got in the water,” he says. First, Robert Wagner said she fell in tying down Valiant, the dinghy. She had a lot to drink and went up on deck to retie the boat that was disturbing her. Or, it was a murder, or an accidental homicide — Wagner discovered the love triangle and threw her in to humble her, to literally cool her off. He was also very intoxicated.
“The play is filled with the things they said to each other. At 10:30 they came back from the restaurant. There was a huge argument, witnessed by the captain who later turned out not to be a dependable witness,” Ceniceroz says.
The captain later told different versions and hinted at knowing the real story.
Ceniceroz adds, “In my play I deliver the goods. You see RJ throwing her in the water, taunting her.”
After Wagner’s official version and Ceniceroz’s fictionalized take on Wagner’s actions, the playwright offers a third version, this time from Wood. He doesn’t want to give too much away but says hers is a more metaphorical tale with choices that get to be made.
Ceniceroz credits his graduate work with Paula Vogel at Brown University for leading him into some of his experimental play techniques. He says he’s looking forward to seeing how the audience will respond, what the expectations are and how he can subvert those. Then he will go to rewrites and see what kind of future life this play can have.
For now, he’s happy to be coming back to Provincetown. His previous play, “The Blind Woman from Veracruz,” was also staged by NPP.
“‘The Drowning of Natalie Wood’ is not going to be everyone’s first choice for a night of theater,” he says. “My goal is not to write a Hollywood story. I want to do theater. I want to show human dynamics based on fact but presented with poetic license.”
artseditor@provincetownbanner.com
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In the Arts
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Feb 22nd, 2007