"The Belle of Amherst" imagines Emily Dickinson at age 53. Julie Harris is 75, and you can't help but wonder, as the house lights dim: Can she pull it off? Well, that question lingers for about 10 seconds, before it's simply swept away by a luminous, captivating performance.
This revival has been staged by its original director, Charles Nelson Reilly, with its original, Tony-winning star, 25 years after it was first performed. The one-woman show is on a lengthy national tour. Having begun at the Laguna Playhouse in California, it will be criss-crossing the country through April. It stopped at CityStage in Springfield, Mass., for four sold-out performances.
There's a special kind of suspension of disbelief at work here. It has nothing to do with physical illusion -- Julie Harris looks nothing like Emily Dickinson, even with her hair pulled severely into a bun and costumed in a replica of one of the poet's pure white dresses. This is not an impersonation, but an illumination of the passionate spirit that inhabits the poems and letters the play is based on.
The dramatic convention here is that we, the audience, are visitors in Emily Dickinson's parlor in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1883. She greets us, a little shyly at first, then warms to the company and launches into an entertaining, anecdotal revelation of her life and art. The play cuts against the conventional image of Emily Dickinson -- the neurotically shy, stubbornly eccentric recluse. That's a cultivated facade, Emily explains, a role she plays, both to protect her privacy and because she gets a kick out of being mysterious and a little scandalous.
This Emily Dickinson is a woman of deep sensitivity, lively intelligence ... and a wicked sense of humor. She tweaks Victorian pretensions, performs deadpan impressions of the people around her, even mocks her own idiosyncracies. But the real genius of the script, and of the performance, lies in the way the poems are gracefully woven into Emily's narrative of her life. It's as if her thoughts are so full that sometimes they simply overflow into verse.
Julie Harris is an actor of rare subtlety and range, and the text gives her a rich variety of expression. Balancing the lively wit, there are poignant and painful moments when Emily gives in to what she calls "that pale sustenance, despair."
If there's a weakness in this two-hour tour de force, it's that from time to time the star seems to tire. Instead of flagging, though, she reaches down into reserves of energy, but pushes too hard and loses some of the nuances in passages that need more time and care. But even in these moments, she has an almost spellbinding rapport with her audience. If "The Belle of Amherst" is about Emily Dickinson's love affair with the world around her, it's just as much about Julie Harris's love affair with live theater. Her delight in being in our company is infectious, and we are just as delighted to be in hers.