For girls who read The Bell Jar in college, Sylvia Plath became part of our trifecta of female poets: Sylvia, Anne Sexton and Dorothy Parker. The dark heroine, Esther, a sort of female Holden Caulfield, seems to have everything going for her. She’s smart, working as an apprentice writer at a magazine in New York, and has a handsome medical school student as a beau. All this and her perfect outfits mask the depression that she is hiding until her suicide attempt leads her from the hospital, complete with electroshock treatments, to sanatorium to (almost) sanity. Or at least acquires the skills at which to fake it.
The Bell Jar is labeled semi-autobiographical and was originally published under a pseudonym. As Sylvia, played by Marcy J. Savastano (pictured), unfolds her life to the audience in Edge: The Story of Sylvia Plath at Studio@620, it seems a little less “semi” and more “names have been changed to protect the innocent”.
