The Belle Of Amherst is worth seeing under any circumstance, and especially so when we attended on the 75th birthday of its star, Julie Harris. Miss Harris won a Tony Award for this portrayal 24 years ago -- her unprecedented fifth Tony as Best Actress -- and she told us yesterday that this tour will be the last times she'll do the role. The Belle Of Amherst stands as the model of what a one-woman (or one-man) play can be. It shows us a day in the life of the 19th century Amherst, Massachusetts, poet Emily Dickinson, as the lady reminisces about her past, speaks of her writing career in the present, and speculates about death. The script is taken from Dickinson's poems and the extensive collection of letters she left behind. Theatergoers who hate poetry readings will be amazed at how unlike a poetry reading this play is. An interesting person and her life are unfolded in front of us, and the poems are woven into the dialogue. Harris is particularly adept at moving from the end of a poem into regular speech without a pause.
With her asides into the wings, Harris makes us believe that her sister and brother are in the house with her. Visitors come to call, and Harris convinces us that they're on the stage with her. It is a tour-de-force, and Miss Harris' performance ranges from quiet intimacy to warm passion to full-volume explosions, with myriads of shadings in between. Her age is irrelevant, and she is quite nimble getting down on her knees to work in her garden and getting quickly up again. She skips about the stage, sometimes mimicking the movement of the birds in her garden. She integrates props, as when she tries out a new invention, the stereoscope, to look at 3-D slides of the Mona Lisa. After extended squinting and changing of angle, presumably to see if the painting's eyes follow her, Dickinson dismissively says: "I don't see what all the fuss is about." Harris does all this with great simplicity and no noticeable artifice. She is totally into her character and at no time does she seem to be a great lady of the theater reprising one of her most famous roles - although that's exactly what she is.
The set is a grouping of furniture, a bit too cluttered. The lighting is superb, cueing us when Dickinson's mind is going back to events of the past, and changing hue to correspond with her moods. This is an event worth traveling to see.
