THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 12, 1995 TAG: 9511110067
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Theater Review
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, THEATER CRITIC
LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
BIOGRAPHER Richard B. Sewall once wrote that ``the whole truth about Emily Dickinson will elude us always; she seems almost willfully to have seen to that.''
Perhaps so, but the Emily Dickinson in the one-woman play ``The Belle of Amherst'' is willing, almost too willing in this version, to give us ample clues. This is an intriguing study in aloneness. In addition to being one of our finest poets, Dickinson was a recluse who, rather than a ``belle,'' was generally considered to be ``Squire Dickinson's half-cracked daughter.''
Playwright William Luce conceived a one-woman ``play'' in which poetry and letters are interwoven with the imagined opinions and personality of Dickinson. The result is a woman who lived an interior life of considerable passion.
The vehicle has become a challenge for a solo actress. First played by Julie Harris who turned it into a Broadway triumph in 1977, the part requires a vivacious and teasing honesty that has underlayers at every tone.
Deborah Mayo is a technically gifted actress who approaches the role with admirable thoroughness. She is clearly not afraid of a tour de force and apparently even seeks the challenge, since she did a similarly complex one-woman show on this same stage in ``Alfred Stieglitz Loves O'Keeffe.''
Mayo's Dickinson is a harsh-featured, wiry woman who has the wide smile that lets us know she wants to be liked. This Dickinson, though, is more an independent eccentric than a sympathetic, even pathetic, loner.
As directed by Jefferson Lindquist, Mayo lacks the vivacious, girlish irony that Harris stamped on the part. Yet she is quite proficient at conveying the more literate moments of the narrative. She goes effortlessly from a fragment of a letter or memoirs to a poem to imagined conversation.
Mayo, like Dickinson's novelist friend Helen Hunt Jackson, seems to ``have the facts, but not the phosphorescence.''
Scott Skiles' set effectively suggests the Dickinson household three years before the writer's death. Rhyan Shipman's costume design - a parade of ``bridal-white'' outfits - is appropriate. Jim Craig's lighting and Erica French's sound are notable contributions.
Although this Dickinson lacks the vulnerability and sassiness that would make her intriguing, she is still, in the hands of Mayo, a tremendously literate creation. This is a theatrical evening about words, and an age in which they were still worshiped.
As this Emily Dickinson says at one point, ``there are words to which I take off my hat/ When I see them sitting on a page.''
This production takes off its own hat to them. It would be nice, though, if, in addition to the words, we could also have the passion. MEMO: THEATER REVIEW
What: ``The Belle of Amherst'' by William Luce
Who: Deborah Mayo as Emily Dickinson, directed by Jefferson
Lindquist, presented by the Virginia Stage Company
Where: Governor's School for the Arts Theater, 254 Granby Street,
downtown Norfolk
When: 2 and 8 p.m. today, 8 p.m. Wednesday to Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m.
next Sunday
Tickets: $18; $15 for students, seniors, military, teachers and
subscribers
Call: 627-1234 by CNB