The following is a note from Tara Schuster, OTBKB reader and the playwright of  Be Brave, Anna! , which is playing in this year’s New York International Fringe Festival

Bringing together 20 artists from the gutter to tell the story of Anna
Nicole Smith, Be Brave, Anna! is a 19th century French melodrama of the life and
times of Anna Nicole Smith. Discover American virtue: trash, glitter,
ambition, and your own series on E! In a world of reality television,
YouTube confessionals, and celebrity worship, what’s a girl from Texas
to do?

According to Schuster, the show is definitely a comedy "but it is written out of love for Anna and all the blond bombshells before her," she wrote in an email.

The show has a website and is playing 8/15 at 6:45; 8/17 2:45; 8/21 9:45; 8/22 3:00; 8/23 3:30 at Venue 12 (115 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village). In the playwright’s own words:

The play began as my own investigation into
the significance of reality television and celebrity worship in
contemporary America. At the bequest of my playwriting professor at
Brown, Paula Vogel, I took off for Paris- I needed exile, I needed
language barriers, I needed to be alone. I was going to Paris to write-
but with no particular project in mind.

I
decided not to speak English, to completely immerse myself in my new
home. I was here to study the French melodrama and to write- no
distractions allowed. Well, almost no distractions. While living in my
14th century apartment (not as romantic as it sounds), I discovered the
sacred pages of Perezhilton.com. Whenever I felt lonely, or just wanted
a lifeline back to America I would check the pages, searching for
gossip, for glam, for, spectacle. As fate would have it, on my second
week in Paris, I was shocked to find out that Anna Nicole Smith had
died. In America, truth be told, I had never really thought about her,
or paid attention to her doings, but in Paris, I was transfixed by the
unfolding drama of her life and death. Something about her death-
something about the way it was plastered all over the pages of
PerezHilton.com, something about the spectacle, about the salacious
details, about the true timelessness of the event made me question what
it meant to be American, what it meant to want celebrity above all else.

The
more I researched the life of Anna, and the way her unfolding story was
being told, the more I saw that Anna’s life and death was not a
tragedy, but a melodrama. It seemed that Melodrama, a low-form of
theatre in 19th century was present in the black and white of reality
television. In melodrama as in reality television, the world is black
and white; life is reduced to a series of challenges, villains, and
heroes.

"Be Brave, Anna!" posits Anna as the
ultimate woman of American virtue. Wrongly accused of being a witch,
she ventures out of her native Texas to redeem her good name. Along the
way we meet J. Howard Marshall, the sweet billionaire, Virgie Mae, the
diabolical mother, and of course, Hugh Hefner, friend to the weak and
marginalized. Exploding with glitter, gesture, dance, and magic, "Be
Brave, Anna!" investigates fame and celebrity through the melodramatic
imagination.