mean?
Each little red star is a clickable link to additional information on whatever listing it appears beside. It might be a link to an article in a local newspaper, or it might be a press release the company has sent me.“Edge”
Posted by Gail M. Burns - January 2010
“The mind only stays engaged as long as your seat is comfortable.”
- former New York Senator Joe Bruno, on plans to replace all the seats at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in 2006
This is not a review of Method Machine’s excellent touring production of Edge, Paul Alexander’s acclaimed one-woman play about poet Sylvia Plath, because I had to leave at intermission. I had to leave at intermission because the space where MCLA Presents! chose to present it – Gallery 51 – was SO UNBEARABLY HOT that I feared I was going to faint. And this was on a frigid January night with the outside door wide open.
So while I applaud MCLA Presents! for bringing this outstanding piece of theatre to North Adams at an affordable price, I seriously question their choice of venue. The college has several performance spaces on its campus – I could see this intimate piece doing very well in Sullivan Lounge. Gallery 51 is always hot, it has no stage (a moveable platform was erected) and the seating – small wooden folding chairs – were uncomfortably crammed together. I was kindly given reserved press seats in the second row and could see the stage clearly, but I don’t think people much beyond the fifth row could see much more than the actress’ head and shoulders.
If the intent was to bring life and vitality to Main Street, another laudable idea, Main Street Stage with more comfortable seats and better sight lines was sitting empty that night just two doors up. I know there is no formal connection between the college and that theatre, but I cannot imagine the management would turn down a chance to host an interesting work and bring a new audience into their space.
And if the idea was to introduce a new audience to Gallery 51, and its current exhibit The Amazing Acoustaphotophonogrammitron, which was only partially installed on the night of the performance, that too failed. With the stage and all the people and chairs crammed in you were barely aware of the artwork, except as an annoyingly incongruous backdrop for a play about Sylvia Plath. I am happy to report that Alexander’s play and actress Marcy J. Savastrano’s performance were so engrossing that I stopped worrying about what was on the walls once the play began, but beforehand I was thoroughly annoyed by the distraction.
COMMENTS ON THE PLAY
“I am made, crudely, for success.”
- Sylvia Plath, journal entry April 1958
It is extremely sad that MCLA put so many impediments in the way of such a gripping piece of theatre. In the right venue, this could have been a highlight of the winter season, which is becoming a time when regional audiences are treated to superior, edgy (no pun intended) works that wouldn’t suit the palettes or pocketbooks of the summer tourist crowd.
Alexander is primarily a biographer, and his 1991 biography of Plath Rough Magic is considered a sensitive portrait of the troubled poet, and an attempt to reclaim Plath for an American audience. Born and raised in the suburbs of Boston, Plath (1932-1963) went to Cambridge University on a Fulbright following her graduation from Smith. There she met and married British poet Ted Hughes in 1956. It was a tempestuous coupling. Their two children were born British subjects and it was in their London flat on February 13, 1963, that she committed suicide. She is buried near Hughes’ home town, and her tombstone has been repeatedly vandalized by fans who have chiseled her married name off the stone, in the belief that Hughes was responsible for her early demise, although she had attempted suicide and been hospitalized for mental illness years before she met him.
Alexander sets Edge on the day of Plath’s suicide, and has her directly addressing the audience. I cannot comment on the complete arc of the play since I only saw the first half. The 17,000-word two-hour long monologue is a daunting task for any actress, and Savastano is only the second performer Alexander has allowed to play the role. He first developed Edge with and for Angelica Torn (daughter of Rip Torn and Geraldine Page) in 2003 at the Actors Studio. She won an Outer Critics Circle Award for her performance and toured the show nationally and internationally.
David Henderson, the director of this production and a founding member and Artistic Director of the Rochester, NY, based Method Machine, was Alexander’s assistant director on the original production. He introduced Savastano, a fellow Method Machine founder, to the playwright and obtained permission for their company to produce the play, which is currently on tour. Savastano and Henderson attended high school and college together and founded Method Machine with Michael O’Connor in 2007.
So Henderson is intimately acquainted both with the material and its creator, and with the actress he is directing. The only physical requirements of the production are a table and a chair, and so all that travels with the show are Savastano and her costume and wig. In the act I saw she looks the very epitome of the perfect 1960’s housewife in a little beaded cardigan and a headband, a look that compliments the early life experiences Alexander has her relate.
I have never read Plath, and I can see why her work and her life-story were not included in the curriculum of the high-pressured super-academic all-girls’ school I attended. We were all little Sylvia Plaths in the making, being held up to impossibly high standards of perfection. Her reasons for wanting to die made perfect sense to me. Hamlet was wrong on this point. If you believe you cannot ever be what you are supposed to be, why “be” at all? But then Hamlet never went to an all-girls’ school. Ophelia, who he urges to “get thee to a nunnery,” is the one who ends up “a document of madness.”
I want to see the second act, and would gladly travel a ways to see the whole show in a comfortable and appropriate setting, but, alas, I am unable to track down future tour dates and locations for this production.
The best I can offer you is this article with video link to a brief interview with Henderson and Savastano, which includes some rehearsal footage, but because Savastano is not in costume here, it gives a poor indication of the look and feel of the live performance.