Edge: Sylvia Plath's Pain and Poetry

Sylvia Plath was, undoubtedly, a fascinating woman who led a fascinating, if brief, life. She wrote beautiful, emotional poetry about her tumultuous relationship with her family, her father's pointless death when she was eight, her suicide attempts, and her violently passionate (and passionately violent) marriage to Ted Hughes. At age 30, she finally succeeded in killing herself, making her abusive husband wealthy with posthumous sales of her poetry and books. But even such a fascinating life can't fill up a two-and-half-hour monologue, no matter how well-written it might be. And such is the millstone around Paul Alexander's neck: while his new bio-drama Edge, currently running at the ArcLight theatre, has some poignant and very interesting moments, the one-woman play loses far too much dramatic tension as it goes on.

If the play sometimes stumbles across the line between drama and melodrama, it's perfectly justifiable: so did Plath's life. The untimely death of a parent, numerous suicide attempts, a dazzling talent hidden under a bushel, an abusive marriage, and the final tableau of her head in an oven--  no soap opera could compare to this true story. And to his credit, Alexander's script makes the pain of Plath's life tragically believable. Using the standard bio-monologue format (historical figure looks over her life just before she dies) as well as images from Plath's work, he studiously examines all of the events and emotions that made the sad girl into the literary legend she became.

But for all the tragedy, for all the pathos, for all the bone-dry and pitch-black humor that marked Plath's writing, the play ultimately feels over-inflated. Few monologues can hold an audience's interest for more than 90 minutes (and those that can are usually musical in nature-- please see At Liberty for an example), and with a script and performance so uneven, Edge runs out of steam long before the final blackout. The play's strongest moments are also its simplest: a dialogue between Plath and a therapist lets star Angelica Torn tear up the stage in the best possible way as she enacts both sides of the conversation. But the next scene, in which Plath visits her father's grave for the first time, is a study in melodrama and histrionics, with the sobbing poet flinging herself onto the ground like a heroine from Dickens. And so goes the rest of the play. For every moment of genuine emotion, there is an equal and opposite moment of dramatically weak whining. It may be historically accurate, but Mr. Alexander's devotion to detail tends to overwhelm whatever tension the play might have. Tightened up to a single act, the play's strongest moments could shine through much brighter.

Angelica Torn bears a striking resemblance to the doomed poet, and nicely expresses the many disparate and conflicting emotions that drove her to both create and destroy. When she describes Plath's pain, genuine tears come to her eyes, and the waver in her voice is pure and unaffected. Unfortunately, when narrating, she tends to speak in one of two ways: taking random... pauses at random... moments for no obvious... reason or talkingsofastonecanbarelyunderstandwhatshesays. At the very least, it means that Mr. Alexander's direction is as uneven as his script. It's good to be consistent.

One needn't be a great fan of Plath's work to appreciate Mr. Alexander's script or Ms. Torn's performance. The story of the young woman's life and career is ripe with dramatic possibilities, and Edge does manage to generate some sparks. In such a long monologue, however, they come few and far between.