Interview: Lorri Holt of WHO KILLED SYLVIA PLATH? at MarshStream Brings the Iconic Writer to Life

If you've attended theater in the Bay Area with any degree of regularity over the past few decades, chances are you've seen actress Lorri Holt - a lot! Since the 1980's, Holt has become a veritable local treasure, performing with theater companies large and small across the Bay Area, creating roles in scores of new plays along the way. Among many career highlights, she was part of the fabled Eureka Theatre Company that commissioned Tony Kushner to write Angels in America where Holt originated the role of Harper Pitt.

Holt's latest performance, in Who Killed Sylvia Plath? by award-winning playwright Lynne Kaufman, is enjoying a virtual return engagement on MarshStream December 12th after winning the award for Best Full Length at the recent MarshStream International Solo Fest. The play had premiered at The Marsh in 2019 before being adapted into a virtual offering for Solo Fest. For tickets and further details, please visit the MarshStream website.

I spoke with Holt recently from her home in Nevada City, California where she happened to have relocated just prior to the Covid pandemic. She is a delightful person to talk to - easily chatty, warm and honest, and full of intriguing details from her extensive career in the theater. The following are edited excerpts from our conversation.

The title Who Killed Sylvia Plath? is certainly intriguing. How would you describe the play?

It's an imagining of, if Sylvia Plath had the chance to do it over again, what would she do? She's going back and looking at her life and the things that brought her to the point where she put her head in the oven. She gives the audience an idea about what her life was like, why she did some of the things she did, what drove her to it, her family difficulties, the tragedies that happened to her before that.

She was a fascinating human being with an incredible amount of talent, an incredible amount of sorrow and self-doubt at times that pursued her like demons. She definitely had mental illness happening and was on medication for it, and in the play we mention something about what happened at the very end of her life. Her medication was changed and it happened to be a medication she did not respond well to. If they would have just called her therapist in the United States, they would have told the doctor, "No, no, no. Don't put her on that medication." But that's not what happened.

How is it that you came to do the piece originally?

Well, Lynne called me up one day and said, "I want to write a play about Sylvia Plath and I want you to perform it." And I said, "What?! But I'm over 60 and she committed suicide when she was 30!" And she said, "Doesn't matter. That's not what it's about." So we started working on it together and she would have this draft and then I would do a reading with other people who gave feedback. And then we would do another draft and work on it [some more]. So Lynne wrote it and I helped her to develop it, made suggestions. I worked with her for about a year and a half to get it into shape for its premiere at The Marsh in San Francisco.

What was it like adapting your performance to a virtual format?

I was completely discombobulated [initially] by the thought of "Well, how can you do it with just me in front of the camera?" But it turns out that many people found it to be even more effective because it's so intimate. You don't miss anything that I, as my character, am going through emotionally or thoughts that are occurring to me. You can see pretty much everything going across my face, which you can't really in a theater, depending on where you're sitting and whether you're turned one way or another. I do miss moving around and talking directly to the audience.

There is something strange about doing it directly into a camera, but it's very intimate that way. There's a poet named Davide Whyte, who lives in the Pacific Northwest and does these series on Sundays. He speaks directly into the camera and he's an incredible poet and an incredibly deep person and it's like going to church for me. I don't even know how many thousands of people are watching from around the world, and each person is having that individualized experience. I was shocked by how intimate it felt, but it does. And apparently it's a little bit like that with this show.

You were obviously quite successful in adapting the show to a Zoom format, given that you won the award for "Best Full Length" at the recent MarshStream International Solo Fest.

That was very surprising to me. I was honored because there were a lot of wonderful performers, and some of their shows had a lot more movement or sets. I mean, all I did was create a set with some white sheer curtains, a bookcase filled with Sylvia Plath books, and some lights that I'm gonna have to figure out how to adjust this week because we shot it in the daytime the last time, and it will be night [this time]. I'm doing it upstairs in one corner of my bedroom. [laughs]

The real Sylvia Plath is both an icon and yet, in many ways, remains a mystery. How did you go about finding the character of Sylvia?

I guess, the way I do most all of my characters. I read a lot of her own work and then I read a lot of biographical stuff. And a brand new, huge, massive biography just came out, called Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark. I wish we could have had this before because there's so much information in there. I've barely started it, but it incorporates so much more than any biography of her that I've heretofore seen, and it has wonderful pictures. I told Lynne about it and she said, "Well, maybe I'll read it and one day we'll do some changes." But I don't think she's really interested in changing the script right now.

I did a lot of research into her life with [husband] Ted Hughes, her earlier life, her family life, and there's just so much there. Even though she had such a short life, it was very, very full and she was really brilliant. Her mind is sometimes disturbing to follow, what she's saying in letters and journal entries, and sometimes it's just like "Wow, she really was a comet, speeding through." It's a shame, what happened, and Ted Hughes is a very problematic person. Do you know much about him?

I actually don't.

Well, they were really connected and they stayed connected even after her death. Ted was a womanizer. She knew about his reputation, but she was determined that they were going to get married and they did. The story of the night they met is in the play, and stories about their life together, some of the things he wrote about her and things she wrote, and their children and what happened in their family life after.

I would liken it to a 7-year itch. He had an affair that precipitated a lot of, I think, her wanting to commit suicide. It was extremely painful for her, but there were a lot of elements. It was all of these things combined in this month when it was the worst winter in 150 years in England, it was called the "Big Freeze of 1963," and she was alone with the children in her flat. She had moved back to London, and it was a miserable time, they were all sick, her medication had just changed. There are biographies that talk about the fact that she and Ted had started to talk about getting back together, but he was still living with the woman that he had essentially left her for, Assia Wevill.

I mean I could go on and on and on about little biographical details that are not in the play, but you get hints of it and you get the basic driving forces behind what made her put her head in the oven. It's a kind of a reckoning from beyond the grave, a looking back on her life and reflecting on what happened and the questioning would she do it again? And I think we make a good ending on it, oddly enough, with that question. There is an element of hope in it because we certainly don't want anyone else to commit suicide, and that is part of the message at the very end of the play. I think you could say that it's "Don't. Keep living. Life is where everything happens. You need to stay."

A tricky thing about doing a play like this is to not romanticize the suicide in any way.

Exactly. And I don't believe we do. In an earlier draft, we got some feedback from people that there was a judgmental tone. I don't even remember what the lines were, but we realized that was not OK and we took them out. Many people have friends and loved ones who have taken their own lives and it's a very painful thing when they are publicly judged or shamed for what they did. We don't know how much pain they were in.

In 2023, it's going to be very exciting because all of Ted's stuff is at Emory University in Atlanta. There is a huge amount of material and there is a trunk that's not to be opened until 2023, so we have less than three years until we see what's in that trunk. Some people think he burned a lot of her journals or letters that were unfavorable to him, but he may have saved them and that may be what's in the trunk. No one knows. There's still mysteries to solve...

I also wanted to talk about your exceptionally long and prolific career in Bay Area theater. I remember a stretch back in the late 1980's when I swear I saw like three of four plays in succession, and you were in all of them!

[laughs] Was it in more than one theater? In the late 80's, I was working a lot at Berkeley Rep and of course at the Eureka Theatre which was my artistic home. And then there was of course the whole Angels in America period of my life and saga. I'm actually working on a memoir right now. I was accepted into the Community of Writers Conference, (what was formerly called the Squaw Valley Writers Conference). Only ten people were selected to work on their memoirs, and I was one of them. The whole group has stuck together and we're doing monthly meetings where we critique each others' new chapters and things like that. So I am at work on a memoir and it's shifting as I go along in terms of what it will mainly be about.

That's fascinating. I can't wait to read it! You originated the role of Harper Pitt in Angels in America, which is probably my favorite play of all time.

Well, yeah, it's a lot of people's. Including mine, I think! [laughs]

When you were part of that first production and the play was still being written, did you have any inkling at the time what a phenomenon it would become?

I think we did. I think all of us knew it was going to be something very special. I was part of the company and we did make the decision together when we commissioned Tony to write it. We were already doing one of his plays, A Bright Room Called Day, and we were so astonished by the brilliance of that play. That was also the beginning of the end of the Eureka, because it was during that period that our General Manager, Mary Mason, got breast cancer and died. Then just before her memorial service, Sigrid Wurschmidt, who was like the heart of the company really and she and I played opposite each other in so many plays and she was the original angel in Angels in America, she got breast cancer. Just when Mary died, she was diagnosed. So actually, the two chapters that I worked on for this workshop were all about that time period. Because Mary died and Sigrid got breast cancer and we had to close the show early, we nicknamed the play. Instead of A Bright Room Called Day, we renamed it A Bridegroom Called Death.

But - we knew [what an important work "Angels" would become]. I've kept journals my entire adult life and there's a lot of stuff in there. I go back [and read the journals] and I go, "Omigod!" I write about when the first draft of the first part came through on a fax machine or something in the office, and we were just astonished. This was like hundreds of pages coming out and we were afraid it would break the machine, and we were going "What?!" and just waiting for it to finish. And that was just the first draft of the first part! It was pretty amazing, and we were like "OK, some of this has gotta go!" But it was all so brilliant that eventually it became a two-part play.

And it was a trail of tears, that play. Most people in it did not make it all the way to Broadway. It's strange bedfellows, commerce and theater, and also just the politics of certain things. I was very, very devastated when I didn't get to go to New York, or even to the mainstage in LA. I had developed it at the smaller stage of the Mark Taper in LA, the Taper II. So there I was between four and five months pregnant, playing Harper who has an imaginary pregnancy and I was like having morning sickness and living alone in a house in Pasadena where there were mothballs stockpiled into the house to keep the skunks away, and my car got sprayed with malathion one night when I was coming back from rehearsal. I was just so terrified of losing my baby. I did end up on bedrest for two and a half months, and my son Sam was born three and a half weeks early - my wonderful son, Sam Fishman. He's in LA now and he's a brilliant, talented guy. He's a musician and a music producer, a wonderful artist. I'm very proud of him, obviously.

Covid has totally upended the lives of pretty much everybody working in the performing arts. Do you know yet what's up next for you after "Sylvia Plath?"

Well, no. Ironically, I had all these things scheduled just when things fell apart. I moved up to Nevada City in the last year and -

Are you calling in from Nevada City right now?

Yes. I moved up here, and I was going to do Colette Uncensored, the one-woman show that I co-wrote with poet and playwright Zack Rogow, at the NorCal Fringe Festival here in March. It was to start like three days after the lockdown started, so that all got cancelled. And then I also was scheduled to perform Colette Uncensored at this beautiful new state-of-the-art theater in the Presidio in San Francisco. My old friend Bob Martin is the producing director there and he had asked me to come and do it for a weekend and I was very excited. That was supposed to happen in May, and that went down the tubes. And Berkeley Rep had asked me for my availability and sort of had me down to be in Wintertime, the play by Chuck Mee.

I actually interviewed Chuck Mee a couple of months ago. He was fascinating!

Oh, I just love him. He's one of my favorite human beings. And he's a wonderful director, really one of my top three directors in the world, I think. So they had talked to me about that, but now they've postponed it for a year. So I did have a lot of things lined up, but everything has just kind of gone by the wayside.

I have a degree in Drama from UC Berkeley and then I went back to school in my forties and got my MFA in Writing & Literature at Bennington College in Vermont, so I took a job writing a novel for this company in LA, called Level 4 Ventures. They give you a very specific kind of outline and you have to stay within the parameters of their project specifications, but within that you can go all kinds of directions and be as creative as you like.

My stepmom passed away last Thursday so I haven't been writing for the past few days. My mom died a year ago yesterday, and yesterday was a sad day because it was also the funeral for my stepmom. I was not there, cause it was in the Midwest where I'm from originally. We moved to California when I was a little girl and every one of them moved back there. So it's been a weird year for everybody and it certainly has been no shortage of sorrow.

Where in the Midwest are you from?

Paree! [laughs] Paris, Illinois. It's a little farming town and my family on my mom's side were, and still are, farmers. My cousins and their children never sold out to the corporate farm thing, and maintain the family farm and still grow corn and soybeans. And in fact - I write short stories, too, and one of them that was published is about the summer that men first walked on the moon. It's about that time period and takes place in Illinois, and another of my stories does, too. You know, you never forget where you're from.

(Photos by David Allen)