By Jim Gilles
On Sunday, June 12, at the Let Live Theatre on Formosa Avenue in West Hollywood was a performance of Segute Miller’s Tragic Magic, a one-woman show which she wrote about her own experience with addiction, recovery and loss.
This play has a difficult story to tell but a deeply personal performance by actress Sigute Miller on stage for this production as part of the 2022 Hollywood Fringe Festival. Her story is not necessarily “tragic” although her life and the curses of alcoholism that ravaged herself and her brother did result in his untimely death and her close encounters with death. She attributes her survival and eventual success as an actress in Hollywood to the “magic” of her decision to take charge of her own life at a certain, crucial life, give up drinking and drugs, and focus on a lifestyle Magic without those debilitating curses haunting her like the “black-outs” she first began to experience as a teenager.
As Sigute Miller explains, “When I was a fledgling actor in my 20s, I always had a dream that I would perform a one-woman show. Some roadblocks prevented this from happening – a producer’s couch #metoo story, insecurity and addiction. After attending a women’s memoir writing workshop for quite a few years, the director approached me and encouraged me to write a solo show, using some of my stories.” And this show Tragic Magic is the result, which she first did as a Zoom show and then live as part of Whitefire Solofest last year. Sigute Miller worked with Beth Bornstein Dunnington and together they made this show happen.
The one-woman show is autobiographical, as are many of the one-person shows in the line-up of the Hollywood Fringe Festival. Sigute Miller grew up in Chicago in a neighborhood full of Lithuanian people like her own parents. She was a good student but soon became a party girl on weekends, first sniffing glue, later smoking marijuana and taking drugs including cocaine, but the real kicker for Sigute was alcohol, which became her go-to drug of choice. Like many people who suffer with alcoholism, drinking alcohol is an addiction which makes it virtually impossible to stop drinking once one starts. And drinking to point of “black out” became a common experience for her.
In creating her story for this play, Miller includes stories about her childhood and her parents, her modeling profession, swimming, and later the vagrancies of working in a high-class women’s clothing store in Beverly Hills with an A-list clientele. Of course, her real interest was in getting ahead with a modeling and acting career – which she does not cover in much detail, other than to say that she too experienced the traditional Casting Couch experience. The somewhat humorous anecdotes of the first half of the play are soon overshadowed by her life as a married woman with a young daughter, after a near-death experience in an auto accident in her late 20s. Miller spends time providing a tribute to her brother, who was a sensitive soul and wrote poetry (which she quotes). He died at age 24 from an alcohol-induced tragic accident.
Her arrest for a serious D.U.I. with her 6-year-old daughter in the car led Sigute to make some major changes in her life and her use of alcohol and drugs. Yes, this is a tale of recovery and transformation. Much later, she traveled to India, where she found some special connection with meditation and Indian religious rituals. What is celebratory for Sigute is her determination to forge ahead with life and stay sober – now for 17 years. This is a topic that is not to everyone’s taste, but then not everyone has those predispositions to alcohol or drug addiction. It is brave of Sigute Miller to bare her soul and her story on stage, but that seems to be what she most wanted to do.
If you are interested in seeing Sigute Miller’s Tragic Magic, there are two remaining performances: Friday, June 24, at 7:00 pm, and Sunday, June 26, at 11 am. The location is the Let Live Theatre, 916 N. Formosa Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90046. Tickets are $12.00 For ticket and more information, go to: https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/7394