-- Frederick Luis Aldama
Heaven and Hell
Burning Down to Heaven. Written and performed by Jennifer Bowen. At the Marsh, 1062 Valencia (at 22nd Street), Aug. 5-12. Call 826-5750.
Anne Sexton died quietly in a purring Mercury Cougar in 1974, after a turbulent, half-sane life. ("To be neurotic is, to me, fairly normal," she once wrote.) She was a friend of Sylvia Plath's, who also killed herself, and belonged to a circle of New England poets that included Robert Lowell and Maxine Kumin. Jennifer Bowen is currently an undergraduate at Boston University, where Sexton taught for years, and she's written a one-woman play about the poet by stringing together real or probable scenes from her life. The play is over, after a brief run at the Marsh, and it was flawed; but Bowen's talent for transforming herself whenever she sent Sexton through one of her stormy fugues made it worth watching.
Burning Down to Heaven presented Sexton's timid beginnings as a poet at the age of 29 (after her first suicide attempt), flashed back to choice traumatic scenes from her childhood, and followed her career through poetry readings and the Pulitzer Prize and into the garage with the Cougar. The show's main problem was that it had no focus, no solid story line. Bowen simply ran through the different faces of Anne Sexton, more or less chronologically. I counted six faces: the little girl, the drunkard, the panicked and pill-mad housewife, the sex-crazed therapy patient, the poet, and the Brahmin sophisticate. The first three were stronger than the others. Some of the poetry-reading was precious, and the sex-crazed scenes felt overenthusiastic. It's true that Sexton conducted an affair with one of her psychiatrists during their sessions; but did she really flash her whole leg and pull on a red garter to seduce him? (I mean, where'd she get the garter?) I can't find anything in my Sexton biography to support this, so I think Bowen must have invented the garter scene to "dramatize" the poet's sluttish self, a strategy that worked crudely.
The show was also full of little errors. It's cheating to have your character simply tell the audience necessary information, like the date, as Bowen did in her final tantrum; I doubt Sexton would have called Rimbaud "Rimbawd"; and the meaning of the title is unprovocatively left up to the audience's imagination. But Bowen's fuguelike intervals of the poet's madness showed flashes of a powerful talent. Her best scene had Sexton mentally transformed into a frightened, frantic girl. She talked in a babyish voice to a dream image of her father, who was about to molest her. "He comes in drunk," she chanted, "huffing and puffing -- ANNE! -- He comes in drunk -- " The scene was scary and weird, charged with sexual panic, and Bowen came back to this manic state a few times during the show. Near the end she had Sexton literally climbing the walls -- sobbing, screaming, ravaged with guilt and remorse -- for no better reason than that she'd just turned 44. These scenes had a nice balance of passion and control: an eloquent sense, like Sexton's best poetry, of the natural shape of a feeling.
-- Michael Scott Moore
