Christy Escobar And Maja Wampuszyc (Photo Credit Bill Coyle)

 

                                                       By Edward Medina

A poet died in New York City. It was an apparent suicide. As most things are in this situation there’s more to the story. Her lover was with her. What was to be a mutual offing had gone wrong. As her lesbian paramour faded away from a mix of booze and pills her lover let her pass without doing anything to save her. One poet passed. The other poet survived. One left a daughter behind to grow up tortured at the loss of her gifted mother. The other gave birth to her own poetry and an acclaimed career while also insuring her dead mate’s work was published posthumously and eventually awarded a Pulitzer prize. Then came the day when there was a phone call and a knock at the door.

Lady Macbeth And Her Lover is new play about passion and art written by Richard Vetere. Inspired by the lives of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Elizabeth Bishop, the playwright presents a psychological thriller that follows the intertwined lives of three women and their search for literary fame and Sapphic love. Corinne and Hope, both poets, make the suicide pact which Corrine survives by not fully committing. Hope’s daughter Emily grows up with her alcoholic father who eventually passes himself. The child is left to be raised by foster parents. Emily becomes a student of poetry herself and one day she seeks out the woman that insured her mother’s fame and was there when she died. Emily arrives with questions, dreams, and desires of her own.

The two women then embark on a cat and mouse relationship. Maja Wampuszyc as Corrine, who let her lover Hope fade away, insists herself upon her dead lover’s daughter first as poet mentor and eventually as next generation lover, is meticulous in her performance. Her careful and calculated manipulations of Emily bring the drama to its boiling point. Christy Escobar, playing the dual roles of mother Hope, and daughter Emily, manages to deliver two unique characters. The first wistful and fragile. The other carries some of the same shades but with a healthy dose of calculation that grows exponentially as Corrine tries to tighten her grip. As these two actors and their characters continue to tussle through time secrets of the terrible night are revealed, an affair comes to light, and a pregnancy complicates matters even further.

 

Director Michele Bossy has guided her actors well and has given them a tight but formidable arena to work within. The stage at The Directors Company is a small thirty-five seat performance space so everything is very close to the audience. Some clever work by scenic designer Brittany Vasta manages to create several locations with ease. Lighting designer Cheyenne Sykes keeps things dark and brooding but also includes eerie projections of images of Hope on the curtained walls of Corrine’s home. As these ladies make costume and make up changes in full view of the observers, with the silent assistance of (ABIGAIL MELBYE our ASM was on stage doing the changes) costume designer Jennifer Fisher, the projected images of the dead poet turn to visual smoke and reshape themselves to new pictures for new spaces. In this way Hope continually haunts the space.

 

There are some clever things taking place to support Lady Macbeth And Her Lover but the script itself is weighing things down. There is surface but no depth and with this myopic view missed opportunities abound. There is much poetry discussed but very little presented. For a world steeped in the realm of poets a lack of poetic presentation is palpable. As an example, there is a moment in the second act when with her back against the wall Corrine decides to present Hope (EMILY) with the final poem her famous Pulitzer Prize winning mother wrote. No one has ever seen this poem. No one knows it even exists. It’s one of many secrets Corrine has been keeping. (EMILY) Hope opens the red envelope and carefully unfolds the paper. She reads the poem. To herself. Silently. She laughs a bit and back in the envelope it goes. We never hear the last written words of the long dead lead character of this drama. If one is calling up the power of the murdering anti-mother Lady Macbeth, one of the theatre world’s richest and most tragic, ruthless, and ambitious characters, within the pages of your work then one must measure up.

 

The Director’s Company

311 W 43^rd St

New York, NY 10036

http://directorscompany.org/

212.246.5877

$25

Oct 31 – Nov 19, 2017