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Sylvia Plath’s suicide at the peak of her career left a legacy of questions that have attracted a cult obsessed with trying to find answers. The people she left behind often seem to be victims of this cult. Plath wrote highly personal poetry, and many academics (rightly or wrongly) use it to analyze her relationships with her mother, her husband, and even her dead father to determine what drove her to kill herself. For example, Plath’s line “Off, off eely tentacle. There is nothing between us” has been used to show that Aurelia Plath was a clingy mother. Yet she wrote of the birth of her brother, “I who for two and a half years had been the center of a tender universe felt the axis wrench and a polar chill immobilize my bones.” Imagine what Freudian-minded English PhDs could do with that.
Rose Leiman Goldemberg’s adaptation of this volume of letters works surprisingly well as a play, because Sylvia’s language is so lucid and dramatic and because the story of her life is so fascinating (there is no real dialogue; Sylvia never saved her letters from her mother). On one level it reads like a 1950s fairy tale, covering the years when she was at Smith, when she won awards and was published, and when she was a guest editor at Mademoiselle. Mixed in with all this glory are accounts of her first suicide attempt, her shock therapy, and the breakup of her marriage to Ted Hughes. The play ends with her death in 1963.
