“Who Killed Sylvia Plath”

Lynne Kaufman

As she sits looking at her own tombstone – the fourth one after feminist vandals keep chiseling away her last name “Hughes” of a husband they believe caused her early-age suicide – Sylvia Plath quotes the lyrics of Taylor Swift, another so-called femme fatale often now linked to the poet who died over twenty-five years before she was born:

“I don’t like your little games,

Don’t like your tilted stage

The role you made me play.”

As she turns around to face us in The Marsh’s intimate setting, she recounts how she stuck her head on an oven when only thirty and asks, “Why did I do it? Would I do it again if given a second chance” Was it a good career move?” 

In Lynne Kaufman’s one-woman show, Who Killed Sylvia Plath?, Bay Area veteran actress, Lorri Holt, takes on the role of Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet – awarded after Plath’s death as was most of her now-recognized praises as a writer – and goes about in the next seventy minutes attempting to uncover for herself and for us the answers to these questions.  Speaking often through a forced but somehow genuine smile with eyes that wander nervously as her hands orchestrate the spilling of words, Ms. Kaufman quickly establishes a connection with both the troubled soul of the poet she now embodies as well as with us, an audience quickly entranced by her story.

Much of her accounting refers one way or another to the meeting, marriage, and break-up with Ted Hughes, another British poet who would go on – long after Sylvia’s demise – to become a beloved Poet Laureate of Great Britain.  There initial rendezvous in a closet is erotically described as is a later episode of love-making where our Sylvia mirrors up and down her neck the fingers of her lover as their passion becomes “like rolling together in a barrel over our own Niagara.”  But for all the mutual, animal-like attraction the two initially had and for all the described meals from the Joy of Cooking she as devoted wife, book-and-housekeeper, and mother of their two children provided her poet husband (as well as trying to find time and energy to write her own poems) – it did not take many years for Hughes to find more excitement in a visiting houseguest, Assea Wevill, also married.

As she describes the days, weeks, and months after both the discovery of his affair as well as her telling him to get out of their house, the breaths of the Sylvia before us become shorter and more audible in their desperation and near panic.  It is only, she tells us, after she stops eating and starts sleeping via pill-popping that she has an epiphany of her identity as a woman.  “I have become a verb instead of an adjective,” she declares as she now describes a renewed drive to write at the grand, wooden desk her ex once had made for her.

But neither her writing nor her children provide enough solace or a true escape from her being “catapulted into loneliness.”  We hear references to other poets who flirted with or committed to suicide.  “We surrender to what poetry leads us to do,” she muses, after earlier surmising, “You die, and people have to take your seriously.” 

Like the skins of an onion being peeled one at a time, Lori Holt sometimes methodically, sometimes randomly with side-trip stories, and increasingly angrily and frantically relates Sylvia Plath’s no-exit journey toward suicide.  All along the way, she is never far from an under-breath or explosively shouted reference to the man many later admirers of hers believed abused her and wounded her psychologically to the point that her depression was incurable and her death, inevitable.

Warren David Keith directs the quiet reflections and gushing outpourings of the deceased poet with a pace that is never forced, never rushed, never too slow.  After a paused, quiet look at a waiting chair, Sylvia then sits, lowers her voice, and becomes a grown daughter, Frieda, talking about a mother who was not the favorite of her two parents.  Turning her head, she is now Ted himself, reflecting his views of his dead ex-wife – all the time clearly through her own biased edits of how she now sees and remembers him. 

But mostly, we learn about Sylvia from her own mouth and her own wonderings as she looks back from wherever she now exists in the afterlife, probing to answer “Would I do it again?”  In the end, that conclusion becomes clear without her ever directly saying so as she looks directly to various ones of us in the audience with one word repeated over and again, “Live.” 

We are left still to piece together the laid-out pieces she has presented to the puzzle of why she early in life succumbed to her depression almost five decades ago with probably so much more to say to the world in her writings.  We leave wanting to know more and grateful for her written words in poems, novel and letters that are waiting to be read – moved by a powerfully conceived piece of work by Lynne Kaufman and one performed with magnetic intensity by a seasoned treasure of the Bay Area, Lorrie Holt.

Rating: 5 E

Who Killed Sylvia Plath? continues through June 16, 2019, Saturdays at 8:30 p.m. and Sundays at 5:30 p.m. at The Marsh, . at the San Francisco Marsh, 1062 Valencia Street.  Tickets are available online at https://themarsh.org/.

Photo Credit: David Allen