If I told you I’d just spent eighty minutes laughing through a play about Sylvia Plath, you’d probably assume I delight in pulling the wings off flies. I do not. Playwright Elisabeth Gray has actually managed to concoct an extraordinarily imaginative piece of black comedy based on Plath’s semi-autobiographical roman a clef, The Bell Jar. (Her depression was like being “trapped under a bell jar, struggling for breath”).
When the audience enters, heroine Esther Greenwood is on her knees, head and shoulders in an open (blue) oven…named Olson. Yes, the oven is a character. It communicates. A faint radio plays. The lights dim. We hear Doris Day sweetly singing Que Sera Sera. A black and white film of Esther’s life begins to play on a panel over the sink. In the film, she lays her head in an oven. PING! The timer goes off on stage. “Wait, I’m not done yet,” protests the corporal Esther pulling out of the oven. I swear to you it’s funny. See accompanying photos—no description can do this justice.
Sylvia Plath was an American poet and novelist (one novel). She married the womanizing British poet, Ted Hughes, and had two children. Like her novel’s protagonist, Plath descended into mental illness, attempted suicide several times and was subject to the primitive electroshock of the 1950s. In 1963, at the age of thirty, a month after the book’s UK publication, she was successful in ending her life…by asphyxiation. The kitchen had been carefully prepared so that her children, sleeping in their bedroom, would not smell gas. She’d placed milk and cookies by their bedside.
Our Esther gets off her knees reaching for her notebook in an effort to write a poem about the moment. Olson objects. “I’m attempting to savor my own death here,” she explains. They converse. (Esther interprets). In the course of the play, during what is, in effect, the parentheses between Esther’s consciousness and death, she reviews her life. Some characters she plays, others we witness in artful black and white silent film, replete with exaggerated expressions and gestures. They move their lips, Esther speaks. (The actress is simply wonderful with accents, characterizations, and physical business) Think Monty Python.
Canned applause. “Welcome to The Better Tomes and Gardens Show.” Esther puts on a crisp white apron finding herself the surprised host. We’re to learn to make “Fifty-Two Liar Lasagna,” “Black Tar Brain Souffle,” and “A Perfect Life…for anybody out there who’s died and just doesn’t know it yet.” This is a woman who positively chirps describing hypoxia (the state of a body deprived of oxygen), surmising offhand she’s currently in stage three: vivid hallucinations. Think Martha Stewart on drugs. The metaphoric recipes are bile in Baccarat crystal.
Esther ricochets from kitchen to screen to cooking show “a woman torn between being a perfect writer and a perfect housewife and not succeeding at either.” (From an article by Mark Piekert). Betrayed by society and love, literature and family, she’s a pinball among plungers, flippers, bumpers and kickers, heading for the hole. You can practically see POW! And WHAM! above her head. Only in the very last few minutes are we caught short with the grim reality of Esther’s death. By then, fantasy has shielded us.
Elisabeth Gray is a fine actress. Among her portrayals, I had issues only with Esther as a child, finding her voice and manner rather (I believe unintentionally) irritating and with the Russian accent of her husband’s mistress-likely meant to seem false. She’s an adroit, game, and rubbery comedienne. (Give her a few real dance steps, Daniel). Her focus is terrific. The creation of a suicide with backbone is artful. It’s a jolt to see her “done.”
Director Daniel S. Zimbler has a keen feeling for timing the dark and funny. A scene where Esther makes love to Olson and parodies giving birth to herself is, if a bit more forward, rather Lucille Ball-ish. And wait till you see her dressed for battle in pots and pans. The biggest feat, I think, is keeping us on course through a wide emotional range-light, but curiously not frivolous. ‘Clearly, a thinking man.
John Farmanesh-Bocca’s films are comic and captivating, balancing broad humor and tension. If he deserves the credit for background music, I can only applaud twice. The selections are quirky but familiar, eminently apt and always raise a grin. Farmanesh-Bocca is also the best and most believable of the company of actors in the role of Esther’s husband, Ned Pews, whether doing a pratfall or chiding her.
The set is inspired. “Set construction” is attributed to Luke Haynes. Does that mean he painted/screened and stitched the kitchen scrim? Bravo if so. It sits firmly on the line between reality and imagination allowing for all possibilities. That Olson is blue seems perfect.
This is an original and ambitious work; a mix of vaudeville and satire, with a dash of Grand Guignol. It’s at no time ponderous, analytical or even depressing. Gray was unable to get permission from Plath’s estate and so could not use actual names. Some of the invented ones are a bit south of whimsy. Occasionally, she carries on a bit too long in one vein. All in all however, it’s an accomplished, unexpectedly entertaining piece of theater .
Initially, Elisabeth Gray refused her Oxford professor’s request to create the play for a symposium, perceiving Plath as “self indulgent, self-involved, and miserable…but I went back and read…Plath has become the trophy wife of the feminist movement, as the damage men can do to women. It diminishes her to suggest a man was responsible for her actions…choice was involved.”
“And I related to Plath’s tendency to self-mythologize,” she admits with a smile.
Gray chose to present her piece under a male pseudonym for fear of not being taken seriously; of agents feeling its appeal might be limited to the hysterical, obsessed, bi-polar and/or female. She was apparently right. Even in this day and age, male agents retreated upon discovering the piece was written by a woman. Common’ people!
Photos by Stephen Stoneberg
Wish I Had A Sylvia Plath
Written by Edward Anthony (Elisabeth Gray)
Performed by Elisabeth Gray and Olson
Directed by Daniel S. Zimbler
59E59 St. Theaters
59 East 59th Street
www.59e59.com
$25
Ticket Central 212-279-4200
Through Sunday October 31
