ACT 1: Princess Mary Tudor, passionate Catholic, daughter of King Henry VIII and the late Katherine of Aragon, is cut by her rejecting father from her claim to the English throne; Mary refused to support the King’s divorce from her mother, his subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn, and his Protestant control of the English church.

Chester, Mary’s loyal servant, brings to Mary a “crazy,” starving, compulsively rhyming lame girl named Jane who makes Mary laugh and relates to her anguish about cruel fathers. Most importantly, Jane predicts Mary will be Queen someday. Mary keeps Jane as her “Foole,” the first and only female jester in the English court. Jane becomes a skilled rhymer and Mary’s confidante. Jane is hurt when Mary rejects her as a friend, reminding Jane she is but a servant. But when Mary is forced on penalty of death to sign a document relinquishing her claim to be Queen someday, Jane secures her seer’s status with Mary, predicting all (actual) events that will lead to Mary being crowned.

ACT 2: Seventeen years later, as Jane predicted, Mary is Queen, the first female to govern England. But now Jane now tells Mary truths Mary does not want to hear. She warns Queen Mary against marrying Philip of Spain, but Mary enters into an emotionally disastrous and politically damaging marriage. When Jane humiliates Mary in front of the court by publicizing Mary’s false pregnancy, Mary banishes Jane from the palace. Chester, Jane’s perpetual enemy, names Jane as a pagan infidel and intends to burn Jane at the stake with the numerous Protestant “heretics” Mary put to death. At the last minute, Mary lets Jane go.

Three years pass with no contact between Jane and Mary. Mary, dying of influenza, calls Jane to her deathbed. The two women ask for forgiveness of each other before Mary dies.

ACT 1: SUN.

Marilyn Monroe, dreaming, is conflicted between continuing with her made up onscreen, eternal “Marilyn” persona, and her “real,” mortal, aging self. “I have made a desert of my life,” she says and, magically, finds herself alone in a terrifying desert. She encounters two very aged Blind Persons who have developed supernatural sensory powers to survive but who have forgotten that they love each other. Offended by what she sees as their ugly agedness, and by their imperviousness to her beauty and fame, she dismisses them.

She spies a handsome Miner (Death) and employs “Marilyn” wiles to attract him so he will take her out of the desert. When the Miner saves Marilyn from a rattlesnake he secretly summons, she falls for him and agrees to stay so that he can feed “his mother the desert.” The Miner hopes that union with the stunningly alive Marilyn will allow him, finally, to “feel love” as humans do. Marilyn and the Miner encounter the Blind Persons and command them to build their desert love nest.

ACT 2: DUSK.

The Blind Persons officiate at Marilyn’s desert wedding to the Miner. She grows increasingly thirsty but instead of offering water, the Miner promises that if she “crosses over” – i.e., allows herself to die - at midnight, his “mother the desert” will bring her back as his forever young immortal bride. Seduced by the thought of an eternal “Marilyn,” she stops drinking water. But when she saves the female Blind Person from the rattlesnake and is moved when the Blind Persons “see” beauty inside her, she takes the water they offer and begins to admire them and helps them recognize their devotion to each other. The Miner leaves Marilyn, dangerously dehydrated, to die on top of a mesa, but she now resists death, and with the Blind Persons digs a hole in the sand to find water…

ACT 3: MOON.
… but finds none. Delirious under the moon, she hallucinates a nightmarish vaudeville that shows her that if she chooses to be “real,” she must relinquish glamour and fame, age naturally and grow inwardly. She rejects the Miner and his demand that she die to her mortal life, and wrestles with him to save the Blind Persons; the Miner becomes a vulture and flies away. The male Blind Person dies, but not before he reunites in love with the his partner. Finding an inner self through acts of love and self-love, Marilyn claims life and intrinsic worth, and strikes out into the desert with the surviving Blind Person to find water and save them both.