A PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF THE BELLE OF AMHERST A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Fine Arts by Kathie Anne Clark, B.F.A. The Ohio State University 1980 Approved by ~~!j(?~ A({V~ Department of Theatre TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION . 1 CHAPTER I. Historical Background •. 3 II. Script Analysis ••• 15 III. Performance Analysis 34 BIBLIOGRAPHY . • • • • . • • • 50 i INTRODUCTION The culmination of the work leading to the Master of Fine Arts in acting is a performance project and thesis concerning the project. The project should allow the actor to demonstrate as many of the skills learned in his training as possible and to demonstrate his range. As my performance project I chose the play The Belle of Amherst by William Luce, a one-woman play based on the life of the American poet Emily Dickinson. I performed the play on April 2 and 3, 1979, in the Laboratory Theatre at Ohio State University. A one-character play is an appropriate performance project for several reasons. Change and variety are essential to drama. In a standard several-character play variety is achieved through more than one char­ acter, so, while the variety of the play may be vast, the range of each character may be limited. In a one-character play, however, the change and variety can only be established by one person, creating a much wider range of emotions in that character. Also, the actor in a one-character play has a greater control over the finished product, which makes the product a better example of his work. When more people are involved, it is difficult to distinguish between the actor's weaknesses and the faults that could be attributable to the director or other actors. Thus, a one-person play is easier to evaluate as a performance project. The written work concerning the performance project is divided into three areas, relating to three different phases of the production 1 2 process. The segments follow a basic chronological pattern of the development of the character and the production. The first chapter deals with the historical background of Emily Dickinson. It is obvious in William Luce's Preface to the play that he used extensive historical research in writing the work. Therefore, it was important to research the historical background to discover Luce's basis for the character. The second chapter is a script analysis, focusing on the character as contained in the play and how that character differs from the historical picture of Emily. That chapter also examines the dramatic structure of the play. The third chapter deals with the acting methods used in the development of the character. The major goal I hoped to achieve by the performances was a clearer sense of my own system of creating a character and what the strengths and weaknesses of that system are. A character that must be sustained alone onstage for an hour and a half cannot be created haphazardly. To sustain a character logically, so that it will be believable to an aud­ ience, requires extensive preparation and a well-defined method to create the character. CHAPTER I HISTORICAL BACKGROUND It is the fate of every person who gains distinction, that sooner or later, there gathers about them a mythology, a mass of legend concerning their lives and characteristics. In time this obscures the real personality and tends to an entire misconception of it and the ideals it stood for. When the personality is unusual, when certain aspects of its experience are unconventional or romantic, the temp­ tation to clothe it in legend is always great. l These words, written by a friend of Emily Dickinson, have been echoed by many other friends and biographers of the poetess. Because of the eccentricities of her existence, many strange and often conflict­ ing legends have arisen to explain her life. In most cases, the legends have served merely to obscure the real person, the human side of Emily. This chapter will deal with some of the varying viewpoints of Emily Dickinson. Even though many of those viewpoints are totally contrary to William Luce's conception of Emily in The Belle of Amherst, they are views to which he had access, as demonstrated by the fact that they come from sources included in the bibliography of the play. His choice to disregard them can give a clearer insight into his own dramatization of Emily. The basic facts of Emily Dickinson's life are fairly straightforward, simple, and uneventful. She was born on December 10, 1830, a date which lMacgregor Jenkins, Emily Dickinson: Friend and Neighbor (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1930), p. 141. 3 4 was misquoted by her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, in at least one of her biographies of Emily. Emily was the second child of Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson. She had an older brother, Austin, and a younger sister, Lavinia. In 1840, her family moved into the home in Amherst, Massachusetts that she was to occupy for the rest of her life. In the late 1850's, she began to withdraw from society, at first not leaving the grounds of her home and finally not leaving the house itself. She began to write poetry in the early 1860's and wrote over one thousand poems and fragments during her lifetime, although most of them were not discovered until after her death on May 15, 1886. She never married, and the furthest she ever traveled from Amherst was to Washington, D.C., and Boston in her youth. Hers was a seemingly simple existence that could have been ignored by the world were it not for the bursts of genius in her poems and letters. The genius of those poems has made the world feel that it must explain the solitude of the life that produced them. Many biographers of Emily have tried and are still trying to do that, but their explanations, no matter how well thought out and researched, remain pure conjecture. Only Emily knew the reasons for the course of her life, and it was a secret that she took with her to her grave. The best that can be done is try to piece together the circumstances of her life and guess how they affected her. A major influence that can be examined is the environment in which Emily Dickinson grew up and in which sie remained throughout her lifetime. The Puritan, New England atmosphere of Amherst must have had a great influence on her way of thinking. That influence was aptly 5 described by Sam G. Ward, an early transcendentalist writer, in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. In part he said: She is the quintessence of that element we all have who are of Puritan descent pur sang. We came to this country to think our own thoughts with nobody to hinder us •••• We conversed with our own souls till we lost the art of commun­ icating with other people. The typical family grew up strangers to each other, as in this case. It was awfully high, but awfully 10nesome~ Such prodigies of shyness do not exist elsewhere. • • • The account may be slightly romanticized, but it serves to illustrate the importance of that element of Emily's environment. The Puritan ethic was an important part of Emily's life, and she was finally forced to make a conscious effort to rebel against it. Even though she was religious, her religion was not of the traditional, acceptable type. Her poems concerning religion show a much more open response to God and his world than Puritan thought allowed. She spurned the trappings of organized re1igion,3 writing to Susan Gilbert (later to become Mrs. Austin Dickinson), "come with me this morning to the church within our hearts, where the bells are always ringing and the preacher whose name is Love shall intercede for us." This idea is stated even more simply in one of Emily's poems, in which she said, God preaches, a noted Clergyman-­ and the sermon is never long, So instead of getting to Heaven, at last-­ I'm going, all along. 2Mi11icent Bingham, Ancestor's Brocades (New York: Harper and Bros., 1945), p. 169. 3Martha Bianchi, Emily Dickinson Face to Face (Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1932), p. 28-30. 6 In the name of the Bee-­ And of the Butterfly-­ And of the Breeze--Amen! In a large sense, her poetry was an extension of her religion. She sent a poem to her cousins upon the death of their mother with a note saying, "Let Emily sing for you because she cannot pray.,,4 The fact that she could not accept God in the same ways as the people around her bothered her from her early years. In letters to a girlhood friend, Abiah Root, the first written when Emily was fourteen, she speaks several times of the religious conversions of various friends and how envious she was of them. 5 To the Puritan way of thought, being different was not acceptable. A person's family makes up a significant part of the environment in which he lives. That was particularly true in the case of Emily Dickinson, since she lived with her family her entire life, rather than moving away as most people do. Throughout her life, her family members remained her closest human contacts. The circumstances of her family life allowed Emily to follow the path she had chosen for her life. Edward Dickinson's estate was sizable enough that Emily never had to be concerned about the practical aspects of life. She never had to work to support herself, or to worry about paying bills, or to marry a man who could pay them for her.