‘Edge’ revives the ghost of Sylvia Plath — again

By Justin Glanville

The Associated Press
Angelica Tom stars as Sylvia Plath in “Edge,” playing at the DR2 Theatre.

NEW YORK  — Sylvia Plath is famous today more for her unhappy life than for her poetry and stories, which is a shame, because her work is well-regarded by scholars.
Unfortunately, ‘‘Edge’’ — a new one-woman play about Plath at off-Broadway’s DR2 Theatre — does nothing to correct that imbalance. The play is set on the day she committed suicide in 1963, and treats Plath (Angelica Torn) more as a psychological case study than as an artist.
There are scenes in a psychiatric ward where she was treated and even a depiction of her death, which she caused by putting her head in a gas oven.
Those moments give ‘‘Edge’’ a voyeuristic feel, making it compelling in a car-wreck kind of way, but unsavory because it seems to wallow in Plath’s misery.
Playwright and director Paul Alexander, who wrote a biography of Plath called ‘‘Rough Magic,’’ is also defeated by Plath’s formidable legend. Like equally self-destructive 1950s icons James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, she has become shrouded in so much mythology that the truth about her life is probably buried forever.
Alexander seems to recognize that on one level. ‘‘Reality is a nebulous commodity,’’ he has Plath say, and the script is strewn with references to ‘‘questions with no answer.’’
But then he turns around and answers the biggest question of all: Why did Plath take her own life? Alexander places the blame almost entirely on her husband, the late English poet laureate Ted Hughes.
Hughes is painted here with all the subtlety of a Disney villain — a violent sadist who practiced black magic (he learned the craft from his mother, we’re told) and encouraged Plath to kill herself when he started an affair with another writer.
All that may be true, but Plath also had a history of mental illness, attempting suicide twice before ever meeting Hughes. Alexander includes those attempts, but by the end of the play any consideration of them is drowned out by the torrent of anti-Hughes vindictive.
Sadly, the play’s flaws overshadow a fearless performance by Torn, the daughter of Rip Torn and Geraldine Page. This is Torn’s first starring role on a New York stage, and she has a haunting way of slipping from hysteria to smugness to quivering insecurity, as she’s required to do here.
But ‘‘Edge’’ itself is just another attempt to cash in on Plath’s tragic life.