The Belle of Amherst.Westside Theatre (see Off Broadway). By William Luce. Directed by Steve Cosson. With Joely Richardson. Running time: 1hr 50mins. One intermission.
The Belle of Amherst: In brief
Joely Richardson—the scion of a revered stage family—plays Emily Dickinson—poet, spinster, great fan of dashes—and many other characters—in a revival of William Luce's one-woman show—a triumph for Julie Harris in 1976. The searchingly intelligent Steve Cosson directs.
The Belle of Amherst: Theater review by David Cote
There’s not enough poetry onstage. I don’t mean flowery language couched in an attitude of twee whimsicality (we’ve no shortage of that). Where are the regular meter, sonorous assonance and fine slant rhymes? Before I caught Joely Richardson’s bright, tremulous turn as the great Emily Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst, I wondered: Is there no room for classic prosody on Broadway or Off? I suppose a producer, pitched a night of actors reciting Poe, Whitman and Plath, would see dollar signs vanishing before his eyes. But the theater has always been a place where a good voice speaking good verse is enough to hold an audience rapt. And Richardson proves that.
Directed by Charles Nelson Reilly, Belle originally played the spring and summer of 1976, winning Julie Harris the Tony Award a year later. In William Luce’s script—folksy but eventually flowering into cosmic ecstasies—Dickinson shyly charms the audience with recipes and jabs at local gossips, eventually getting around to her phenomenal but frustrated literary career. At its best, the script blurs the line between Dickinson’s biographical revelations and her haunting, soul-prickling poems, which Richardson slips into with sly intelligence.
Steve Cosson normally handles weirder material by The Civilians or Anne Washburn, but here he just lets us listen, accenting passages with David Weiner’s cozy lights or Daniel Kluger’s birdsong just beyond the walls. Richardson, genetically unmissable as the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave, may be too classically gorgeous to pass as plain Emily (and her American accent favors nasal flatness over musicality), but the portrait that emerges is quite affecting and ringingly clear.
THE BOTTOM LINE Richardson’s Dickinson is poetry in motion.
Follow David Cote on Twitter: @davidcote