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There’s a Certain Slant of Light (and Talent) at Actors Forum Theatre
by Amy Lyons

The snatches of rhyme she scribbled on scraps of paper detail the limitless joys of the earth’s natural landscape and the infinite depths of grief. But this 19^th Century student of life learned most of her lessons behind closed doors, hidden away in her father’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts. Taking long, sprawling trips of the imagination, Emily Dickinson authored a staggering 1,800 poems, many of which are widely studied in academia and packed into impressive anthologies alongside the words of American icons of letters like Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost. Currently, Dickinson is being honored at Actors Forum Theatre in NoHo, with a heart-wrenching, soul-satisfying production of The Belle of Amherst, a one woman show written by William Luce about the inner life of the reclusive, plain girl from the East Coast, whose life’s work lent the nation’s poetic canon some of its most stunning sentiments.

A Tony-award winning play, The Belle of Amherst allows audiences to tiptoe around the house with Dickinson as she putters, bakes, adorns vases with wildflowers, and silently evolves into a perfect practitioner of the pen. In the production at Actors Forum Theatre, actor Kate Randolph Burns taps into Dickinson’s girlish nature at the outset and has us emotionally hooked and completely in love with the delicate shut-in from word one.  

From the little girl who wrote into the wee hours of the night, to the grown woman still girlishly enrapt with her stern, lawyer father –who was treasurer of Amherst College – Burns tracks Dickinson’s path with authenticity and hefty emotional nuance. Burns has the courage to march squarely into Dickinson’s dark places – as recounted in “My life closed twice before its close” and “Because I could not stop for death” – and allows herself to feel fully the pain the poet was putting on paper, without resorting to melodrama or emotional manipulation. Her masterful employment of emotional transitions lends power to Luce’s text; when tears frequently well up in her eyes, they just as quickly abate, as Burns gracefully pulls our poetic heroine from the maw of emotional meltdown by simply smiling and offering to show us her newest batch of baked goods. It is truly breathtaking to see the full emotional capacity of a poet who was not lauded in her lifetime, but gained immense pleasure from bird-watching and likewise felt deep sadness over the curses of nature’s darker forces. Burns simply doesn’t miss a beat, paying homage to a woman wholly dedicated to living life to the fullest, though traveling only on scant occasion outside her little patch of earth called home.

The hand of director Tony Sears is also an effective guiding force along this production’s path. Sears seems to envision the poet exactly as she was: a shy, socially limited sort; and not as we would like her to have been: a poised literary lady.

Whether or not Dickinson had any love affairs in her lifetime is a mystery. She withdrew from society at the age of 23, a choice that some analysts say came after a crushing love affair. She dressed in white, decided against going to church (“Some keep the Sabbath going to Church/ I keep it at Home/With a Bobolink for a Chorister/And an Orchard for a Dome”, she wrote) and eschewed formal education, save some training at Amherst Academy and a stint at Mount Holyoke. But, as The Belle of Amherst deftly points out, it is unfair to assume she was anything but joyful about the unconventional life she built. “The Soul selects her own Society”, Dickinson once wrote; and that’s exactly what she did.

To hear more poignant poetry read with astonishing care, don’t miss Kate Randolph Burns in The Belle of Amherst. 

Thorough October 12 at Actors Forum Theatre, 10655 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. For tickets and more information, call (888) 811-4111.

Amy Lyons is a professional freelance journalist, theatre critic and playwright, with a degree in Theatre Arts and English from UMass, Boston. Her articles, theatre reviews and photos regularly appear in numerous publications, including Beverly Press, Valley Life Magazine and The Record Collector News. Amy also serves as a script reader for Reliant Pictures. She can be reached at amykly@yahoo.com.