The Circle in the Square Theatre is a two-hundred-seat venue on Bleecker Street, where a production of Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata brings The Playwright face to face with Marilyn Monroe from within a crowded, intimate auditorium. The theatre matters not simply as the site of a performance: its small scale makes the movement of people through the room, and the act of seeing and being seen, central to the scene.

Setting and Scale

The account places the theatre on Bleecker Street and emphasizes its limited capacity: only two hundred people can attend. The room is populated by The Playwright’s friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, and the production’s director is an old friend of his. This is a professional and social gathering at once, with the audience made up partly of people connected to the playwright and the world of the production.

The scene begins just before the lights go down. A buzz of excitement passes through the audience, and The Playwright turns toward the back of the auditorium. The narrative offers few architectural details, but it makes the space legible through movement: the central aisle, the seats in the second row, and the brief interval before the performance begins. In a theatre this small, Marilyn’s passage down the aisle is not a distant entrance onto a stage. It unfolds among the spectators, where her appearance can become an event before the play has started.

The Ghost Sonata Premiere

The Playwright is attending the opening of The Ghost Sonata with Esther, his wife. When he notices Marilyn advancing along the central aisle, he first believes that she has come alone. The impression fits his memory of her as solitary, but it does not last: he sees that Max Pearlman is with her, accompanied by Pearlman’s wife and their friend Marlon Brando.

Brando acts as Marilyn’s escort, laughing and talking with her as the group takes seats in the second row. The narrative gives her arrival the heightened quality of a celebrity entrance, yet the details of her clothing resist the image of polished Hollywood display. She wears a dark wool coat bought at a second-hand clothing shop on Broadway and has no hat. Her platinum-blond hair, slightly darker at the roots, catches the dimness as the audience waits for the lights to fall. The contrast between the recognizably famous star and the ordinary, used coat keeps the entrance specific rather than merely glamorous.

A Room Organized by Looking

The theatre gathers several kinds of spectatorship into one confined space. Marilyn is watched by the audience as a public figure; The Playwright, in turn, watches her from beside Esther. He is over six feet tall, but folds himself down into his seat in the hope that Marilyn will not see him. His physical effort to disappear gives the room’s social arrangement a sharp irony: the star’s arrival attracts attention, while the man who has known her tries to make himself smaller and less visible.

Esther touches his shoulder and asks whether the woman is Marilyn Monroe and why he has not introduced them. Her question makes the unspoken encounter explicit. The Playwright is not merely watching a famous visitor enter a theatre; he is sitting beside his wife while a woman with whom he has a deeply personal history appears in public. The location’s small audience and central aisle place that private tension within a shared, observable setting, without any need for a confrontation onstage.

The Theatre’s Narrative Significance

The scene’s force depends on the difference between Marilyn’s visibility and The Playwright’s concealment. Elsewhere, at Schwab’s, she has to remind herself that she is an actress and manage how others look at her; here, her entrance prompts excitement and immediately becomes part of the audience’s attention. The two settings frame public visibility differently, but both make looking an active pressure rather than a neutral background condition.

The Playwright’s later reflection confirms that the encounter is more than an accidental sighting. He knows that Marilyn has seen him, and he believes she knew he would be there before entering the theatre. He also recognizes how her new position in the city has altered the social world around her: she has new friends ready to tell her things, while strangers—respectable men and women among them—are eager to associate themselves publicly with Marilyn Monroe and be photographed beside her. The theatre thus becomes a precise setting for celebrity’s double effect: it places her within reach of people who want to be seen with her, while leaving The Playwright close by, hidden beside his wife and unable to escape recognition in the story’s emotional terms.