Welcome to Radar, where we run down the up-and-coming arts events to mark your calendar for. Today's edition is a dark performance piece about poet Sylvia Plath's life and death:
Method Machine Productions and [email protected] present Paul Alexander’s homage to Sylvia Plath’s lifework with Edge: The Story of Sylvia Plath. The one-woman show, starring Marcy J. Savastano, shadows Plath in the final hours of her life, as she reflects on her childhood, her husband, poet Ted Hughes, and her own legacy. In the tradition of great writers (and poets especially), postmortem fame is achieved as much through personal eccentricity as it is quality of work — and to get any kind of street cred in the writing world, authors compete for both the Pulitzer Prize and the most morbid method of committing suicide. Sylvia Plath wins in both categories: she’s the first writer to be posthumously awarded a Pulitzer, for The Collected Poems, and her only novel, The Bell Jar, is lauded for its dark, semi-autobiographical exploration of a spiral into mental illness. As for the suicide, she carried it out in grand style when, at the age of 30, she sealed herself off from her children’s bedrooms, turned on the gas stove, and stuck her head inside. Aug. 6-16, 7 p.m. Thurs.-Sat., 1 p.m. Sun., The [email protected], 620 First Ave. S., St. Petersburg, $30 front row seating, $25 general admission, $15 students and seniors, 727-895-6620, studio620.org.—Franki Weddington
