Edge

At one point in the one-woman, multi-charactered play called Edge, Sylvia Plath, then a college student with vague aspirations to be an artist, describes her drawings as "elegant" and "precise." It's a description easily applied to the performance of actress Angelica Torn as Plath, who gave up visual art for a life of poetry, then eventually gave up life as well. Combined with playwright Paul Alexander -- who also directed and designed the evocative lighting -- Torn delivers a portrait of Plath that is aching, funny and enraging. People unfamiliar with Plath's work nevertheless may have some image of her as victim, a brilliant but troubled writer driven to suicide by her poet husband Ted Hughes. But Edge provides no wallow in pity. Plath (1932-1963) here is self-aware in her surrender to Hughes, who emerges as cold, violent and selfish: " He was an addiction I didn't want to cure." She herself can be wry, catty and condescending in her judgments: Hughes was "boring" -- in his poetry and elsewhere.

Angelica Torn in Edge is never boring. She is razor sharp as the New England-born-and- -raised daughter of demanding parents, an alternately suicidal and self-assured woman who would spend the last years of her life in old England, where Briton Hughes insisted on living after their marriage.

"This is the last day of my life" is Plath's first line in the two-act play as the poet and novelist (the autobiographical "The Bell Jar") prepares shares her version of events. The stage is set as simply as that line: an upholstered chair with wooden arms at center, a desk with cane-backed chair at right, and, at left, a dead plant on a small table that goes unremarked upon throughout. Costumed in a sage-green dress with black sweater and pumps, Torn in the first half portrays Plath at several ages and as a half-dozen other characters. The first act ends with Torn delivering a breathtaking conflation of Plath's fierce emotions toward her long dead father -- "you monster" -- and Ted Hughes. The second act is devoted to her marriage to Hughes, a span of less than seven years that nevertheless echoes through literary lore.

Despite the prominence of two poets, Edge isn't a poetry reading. Attention is brought only to the opening line of one poem, written by Plath about her young son; the second of her children. But the dynamics of a writing life are signaled even before the play begins. A few minutes before curtain, Torn is seated at the desk, her back to the audience, writing in a black, school-composition notebook and striking through words. Before Act II, she is again at the desk, this time typing -- an audible, percussive speeding-up of the process, just as the second act will be a sped-up march to the end of Plath's life.
 
In fact, there is a musical quality to Torn's performance as Plath. Her voice rises and falls, quickens and pauses -- the actor's version of a musical rest. A string a clipped tones register as staccato. Angelica Torn, in effect, is performing a one-woman symphony.