Review: SYLVIA SYLVIA SYLVIA at Geffen Playhouse

Do famous dead poets experience pressure? Performance anxiety beyond any obvious pressure of, you know, being deceased? If there were indeed circumstances that caused people to – as the well-trod saying goes – turn over in their grave, you’d think Sylvia Path wouldn’t get a lot of rest. All those tortured souls looking to her oeuvre of poems (to say nothing of THE BELL JAR) and wanting to write like Sylvia Plath, heck to be Sylvia Plath. Emily Dickenson, too, but since our subject is the world premiere of Beth Hyland’s SYLVIA SYLVIA SYLVIA at The Geffen Playhouse, we’ll save any concern about Miss Dickenson and her peaceful afterlife for another occasion.

In SYLVIA SYLVIA SYLVIA, Ms Plath not only gets to live out a portion of her wedded bliss (and some far less blissful parts) with the poet Ted Hughes in 1958, she is summoned to 2026 to provide inspiration to a young author named Sally who is being eclipsed by her on-the-rise literary husband, Theo.  Sally, who experienced fame with her first book, is now perilously blocked as she bangs away at a book either about or based on the life of Plath and Hughes. For inspiration, she and Theo are living in Plath and Hughes’ former apartment in Boston. Sally has also experienced depression and is treated very gingerly by her adoring husband. Ted Hughes calls his wife “Monkey” as an endearment.  Sally and Theo call each other “Shmoopie” the very utterance of which is precisely as gag reflex-inducing as it sounds. In fact, even more.

Hyland has written what aspires to be a literary-inspired tragicomedy touching on issues related to artistic inspiration and identity. If that sounds hi-falutin, well, SYLVIA X3 operates on a baser level because it is trying to be perhaps too many things at once and not really succeeding at any of them. There are laughs and gasps, instances of cruelty, betrayal and tragedy. In a four-character play, the playwright has created two complicated, layered female characters and two men who are different species of louts because, OK, if you accept the premise that all women are versions of Sylvia and all men are Teds, that’s kinda how it goes.  Director Jo Bonney’s production is pitched to embrace comedy, horror and certainly pathos. It’s all over the place. Then again, so is its heroine.

That’s Sally, who actress Midori Francis presents as a charismatic but tortured mess before the play allows her to complete her hero’s journey, (largely through a play-concluding "here's how it ended" monolog.) Downcast  and broken for large stretches of the play, the petite Francis is positively dwarfed by the larger and more imposing Sylvia Plath (played by Mariana Gailus) and Cillian O’Sullivan’s Ted Hughes, both of whom she shares scenes with since Sally has “summoned” the two writers for different reasons.  Completing the quartet, Noah Keyishian’s Theo is all cuddliness and surface affection for his Shmoopie mate until he unleashes his inner scumbag and Hughes-es Sally. Because, again, that’s what destructive messed-up writers do to each other if not to themselves.

Of the four, Gailus is the most interesting to watch, especially during the scenes in which she’s enacting a character rather than a construction. In the opening scenes, the early domestic interactions between Gailus and O’Sullivan have a whiff of authenticity. It’s certainly buyable that, holed up together in a small Beacon Hill apartment, both of their stars on the rise, Sylvia Plath was a cheery pie-baking housewife, celebrating her husband’s ascension and dreaming about the “lots and lots and lots of babies” that she hopes to produce. O’Sullivan’s charm masks Hughes’s inner rottenness, at least for a time.

Artfully straddling two time periods, the Beacon Hill apartment set (designed by the company Studio Bent) changes decades through the shifting of a wall and some wall hangings that seem to appear and disappear as if by magic. Lap Chi Chu’s lighting and Lindsay Jones’s sound nicely enable some creepier effects. Visually, SYLVIA SYLVIA SYLVIA looks great.

Would that the play did better by its title character. There are nearly a dozen plays featuring Plath, many of them solo performances (and not counting attempts to dramatize THE BELL JAR.) And we’ll probably get more. Gailus’s work aside, this one’s a misfire.

SYLVIA SYLVIA SYLVIA plays through March 8 at 10886 Le Conte Avenue, Westwood.