Thief —
how did you crawl into,
crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long,
— excerpted from “Sylvia’s Death” by Anne Sexton
“That was my death!”
On the suicide of her contemporary and friend, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton’s famous indignation speaks volumes on the troubled nature of the two American poets’ lives. Both high-profile literary figures whose mental illness and subsequent suicide remain as essential to their identities as their poetry, they are complex symbols of literary ambition and the American conception of fame.
After last year’s mainstage adaptation of Dave Bidini’s collection of short stories on Canada’s icebound obsession, Five Hole Stories, this year’s High Performance Rodeo centrepiece again draws on the literary with Sylvia Plath Must Not Die. A production exploring its titular poetess (Onalea Gilbertson) and her relationship with Sexton (Denise Clark), with words drawn largely from the poets’ writings, its title speaks both to Sexton’s strangely jealous view of Plath’s suicide and to the production’s focus on two figures increasingly obscured by their own mythos, year by year. Amid the unique spectacle of the Rodeo’s 22nd year as Calgary’s avant vanguard, between one-man shows and an ersatz carnival in the Epcor Centre’s centre court, Sylvia Plath Must Not Die will expose the artistry behind its troubled poetesses’.
Originally conceived as a literal cocktail party built from the correspondence exchanged by the two poets, Sylvia Plath Must Not Die focused largely on its characters’ biographies. However, as One Yellow Rabbit’s collective creation process waned on, director and playwright Blake Brooker decided that the dramatization was a “meek gruel” for the deeply human, even traumatic themes of Plath and Sexton’s work. Instead, the ensemble turned directly to the authors’ poetry, hoping to find what Brooker calls a “visceral relationship.” It was an essential experience for the ensemble, with Brooker admitting that before the piece’s writing, he suffered from the same selective knowledge of Plath that often allows her to exist as a single-dimensional literary celebrity.
“If you ask someone to think of a female American poet, who do they say?” he asks. “They don’t say Marion Williamson or Elizabeth Bishop or many great poets, they immediately say Sylvia Plath. Then you say, ‘recall a poem.’ They can’t. [Poets like Plath and Sexton] are famous because they’re famous, or because they killed themselves.”
This attempt to move beyond the edifice of Plath as suffering artist led the company toward the words that made Plath and Sexton famous. While its current incarnation maintains the characters of the poets’ husbands — Ted Hughes (Michael Green) and Alfred “Kayo” Sexton (Andy Curtis) — it now uses ensemble-created scenes to provide the framework for dramatized readings of the pair’s poetry. Backed by Richard McDowell’s jazz-inspired soundscape, the piece embraces its literary roots with systematic care — including projected titles to identify the work being read and a bibliography in its program.
Created in rehearsals, workshopped publicly in the spring and revisited in the week before the Rodeo’s opening, the resulting work allowed the Rabbits to investigate the substance behind the macabre sheen of the poets’ lives, evaluating their source material instead of the myth.
“Yes these women were famous because they were suicides, because they were disturbed, and people are attracted to car wrecks, to mishaps. People always crane their necks and I think that always happens with these figures,” says Brooker. “We wanted to know if there was anything behind that. What is behind the myth? What is the work? Does it stand up? Is it important, is it interesting, or are these women just famous because of their sad, untimely and dramatic passing?
“People wonder what poets do, and we don’t read them as a society very much, because it doesn’t mean much to us. We don’t understand it, because it seems difficult to penetrate,” he adds. “Sometimes, when you hear it, [it] does take on a different feel, we don’t just understand it, but we take meaning from it. Meaning is understanding plus feeling, and that’s what we’re playing with here. We find all the humour, the desire, the difficulty.”
If contemporary audiences aren’t likely to expose themselves to poetry, the same certainly can’t be said of One Yellow Rabbit. No strangers to the visceral and poetic, the Rabbits’ latest draws on the context of two previous productions: Doing Leonard Cohen and The Dream Machine. From the poetry of an iconic Canadian poet and songwriter’s Beautiful Losers to the experimental work of the Beats, exemplified in Brion Gysin’s titular dream machine, the company has already demonstrated the importance of iconic poetic figures in its work, even positioning its latest in the framework of Cohen and the Beats.
“We call [Sylvia Plath Must Not Die] our third piece in our ‘Typewriter Trilogy,’” says Brooker. “From the hyper male [of Cohen] to a more ambiguous sexuality [in the Beats], to very strong female voices. So that’s the end of a gesture, a series of things we’ve been exploring as an organization.” In fact, he adds, there is some interest in exploring the three pieces in repertory performances during an indeterminate future run.
It is more than exploring text that drives the Rabbits in their latest production. While the words that Plath and Sexton wrote gave them the profile that would eventually be supplanted by the macabre details of their deaths, they were still fuelled by a pair of personalities as distinct and powerful as their poetry. In exploring their words, Sylvia Plath Must Not Die is part reading, but also an exercise in uncovering two distinct, now-infamous characters.
“As it turned out, the texts of the women — the work is different, in some ways similar, both strong, individual, both dealing with similar things,” says Brooker. “But both of them were brilliant and I think essential reading to understand where we’re at, where we’ve come from and possibly where we’re going as a culture.
“People read Anne Sexton poems at weddings,” he muses. “They should.”
