What a joy it is that Julie Harris has been touring with The Belle of Amherst. Younger readers may not know that Ms. Harris portrays Emily Dickinson in William Luce's one-woman play, which incorporates her poems into the monologue. This partnering of actress, director and playwright is a classic and distinctly American landmark. It gave new life both to the legend of the poetess and to the solo form when it opened in 1977, directed -- as it is now -- by Charles Nelson Reilly.
Emily Dickinson was born in 1830. Sequestering herself in her father's house in Amherst, she made an unsurpassed contribution to poetry. Belle discovers her in her fifty-third year, 1883. She tells us straight off that the community thinks of her as "the half-cracked daughter of squire Dickinson," and she confesses, "I do it deliberately." But then we spend the evening with a woman who does indeed seem slightly to the tilt. Ms. Harris does this by gamboling through the script allegretto, and through a trick of analysis: she begins the lines of the new beat without a moment's pause, before she's emotionally completed the old one. And so the mind and heart seem slightly out of sync.
Much of Dickinson's poetry was both meticulous verse and meticulous prose; she sometimes embedded it in her letters. And so Luce embeds it in this extended monologue. Ms. Harris delivers it so disingenuously that there are thrilling moment when we discover quite unexpectedly that we're in heightened language.
Many of the familiar poems are here: "I never saw a moor"; "Success is counted sweetest"; "This is my letter to the world". And Luce has her give voice to both "If fame belonged to me" and "I'm nobody - Who are you?", acknowledging her obsession with fame. There are dark poems, too, like "Because I could not stop for death", and "I cannot live with you," but the tone is decidedly lighter than it might be from another playwright. There was a depressive in Emily, who wrote images that would be maudlin from a lesser poet. One poem ends: "Just when the Grave and I Had cried ourselves almost to sleep - Our only lullaby." And so Belle is the perfect vehicle for this extraordinary actress. Harris is as expressive as ever. Her acting is disarmingly unaffected, as fluid and spontaneous as a waterfall. Her performance seems so artless, we feel she couldn't lie if she wanted to.
I talked with Harris once about the play and asked her what makes it work -- with no drama. no conflict, no plot. Her answer: "I want everyone to love Emily Dickinson, and to know her heart, as I do. It's thrilling to me to be a part of her thought and life. I think it's this absolute fierce conviction that I love the very words I'm speaking that makes people listen. I want them to get inside her heart. I want them to understand her... I used to feel at the end of that play like I was really floating on a magic carpet of her ideas, of her feelings. They were so extraordinary." We might say the same.
