Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath

Elisabeth Gray deserves full marks for bravery. In the one-woman play "Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath," she takes on the challenging persona of the titular suicidal poet while also portraying other characters, including the oven in which Plath asphyxiated herself. The 80-minute piece won an award at the 2008 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and is running at 59E59 Theaters with the poet's only play, "Three Women," as part of a mini Plath festival.

Eschewing the standard chat-with-the-audience template for a solo work about a famous personality, playwright Edward Anthony imagines a delusional dialogue between Plath—here called Esther Greenwood, the heroine of Plath's autobiographical novel, "The Bell Jar"—and the aforementioned cooking appliance. In the moments before her death, Plath/Greenwood attempts to write a final poem but is constantly interrupted by Olson the oven. Gray supplies the voice of Olson, who sounds exactly like Charlie Brown's teacher in the animated "Peanuts" TV specials.

Anthony then veers off into a too-clever premise by having the heroine morph into a cooking-show hostess, demonstrating how to prepare such metaphorical dishes as Fifty-Two Liar Lasagna. The ingredients include one adulterous husband, two screaming children, three ounces of ambition, four unchopped poems, and one Babylonian whore. Not exactly subtle. In between cooking lessons, Plath/Greenwood interacts with video images of her unfaithful husband, distant father, demanding mother, and yammering kids—all either belittling her poetry or distracting her from it with their own needs. Anthony makes it seem as if Plath were suffering from an oppressive home life rather than from chronic mental illness. He also fails to include any of her work—apart from a brief childhood verse to her daddy—which would have at least given us an idea of who Plath was and what she wanted to express. Here she just seems like an overburdened housewife who can't balance her time between writing and cleaning the house.

Gray does her best to rise above the heavy-handed script and the broad direction of Daniel S. Zimbler. She conveys Plath's passion for words and her desperation to give voice to her frustrations. She also has fun with the various characters, particularly her husband's young mistress, who uses a bad Russian accent to disguise her voice. But ultimately the script fails the subject and the actor.



Presented by New Umbrella at 59E59 Theaters, 59 E. 59th St., NYC. Oct. 10–31. Tue. and Wed., 7:30 p.m.; Thu.–Sat., 8:30 p.m.; Sat., 2:30 p.m.; Sun., 3:30 p.m. (212) 279-4200 or www.59e59.org.