Review: A Captive Emily Dickinson in ‘Because I Could Not Stop’

NEW YORK — The great American poet is as restless as a cheetah in a cage. She paces in frenzied circles, collapses onto the floor in brooding meditation and folds piece after piece of small paper with fretful, concentrated industry.

Sometimes she glares at the audience watching her, as if through invisible bars. “I’m nobody,” she snarls. “Who are you?”

Those are the first words spoken by the title character of “Because I Could Not Stop: An Encounter With Emily Dickinson,” a new production from the Ensemble for the Romantic Century, starring Angelica Page. Presumably you’ve heard them before, first read to you by a parent, perhaps, or an English teacher.

More recently, Cynthia Nixon cooed them lovingly to an infant — not during her campaign for governor, but in the 2017 Terence Davies film about Dickinson, “A Quiet Passion.” But that deathless declaration of anonymity has probably never been uttered with the resentful ferocity that Page brings to it, in this fuzzy multimedia production at the Pershing Square Signature Center.

The once popular image of Dickinson as a self-effacing, self-sacrificing recluse has been shelved in recent years. Evidence of the Massachusetts writer’s more combative, proto-feminist streak was emphasized not only in Davies’ excellent movie but also in a 2017 exhibition titled (here we go again) “I’m Nobody! Who Are You? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson” at the Morgan Library & Museum.

Page’s Emily, though, may be the most flamboyantly unhappy version to date. An intense and gifted performer known for her stage portrayals of her mother, the fabled actress Geraldine Page, and another celebrated poet, Sylvia Plath, Page here conjures an anguished Emily in captivity, whose brittle acerbity and magnificent moroseness are rather in the mode of Dorothy Parker, minus the cigarettes and martinis.

The context for this characterization is both copious and inadequate in “Because I Could Not Stop,” written by James Melo and directed by Donald T. Sanders. Like most offerings from the Ensemble for the Romantic Century, this one is multidisciplinary, blending words with music and elaborate visuals. It’s an approach that worked beautifully in the company’s “Van Gogh’s Ear” last year.

Here the various elements seldom reflect on one another in mutually illuminating ways. Vanessa James’ set suggests a hybrid of deco luxury (clear mantelpieces with crystalline swans inside) and New England homeyness (the little desk at which Emily writes), with what look like outsized handwritten poems embedded in the floor.

Clearly, we are in the abstract realm where artists cogitate and compose. Stylized renderings (by David Bengali) of slowly opening flowers, swaying grass and birds on the wing are projected onto a screen, along with timeline factoids about Dickinson’s family and the era in which she lived.

A quintet of musicians and the soprano Kristina Bachrach perform (beautifully) music by Amy Beach, a 19th-century American composer to whose work I am glad to have been introduced. Yet I had trouble linking its soaring romantic strains with the hymnbook metrics and crisply chosen words of Dickinson’s poetry.

Page’s Emily recites from some of these poems, as well as providing Dickinson’s recipe for black cake. She watches, excluded and contemplative, as the other performers play flirtatious, courtship-minded games of musical chairs and blind man’s bluff, and sobs into a handkerchief looking at projections of casualty statistics from the Civil War.

She is also an Emily who very much minds being invisible. “I wonder how success would taste, just a drop,” she says ravenously. The haunting sense of mortality and eternity in Dickinson’s work often takes a back seat here to more worldly concerns.

And despite the extensive visuals of flora and fauna, this Emily never seems to revel in nature’s bounty. “If God had been here and seen the things that I have seen — I guess he would think his own paradise superfluous,” she says toward the end. Yet the impression given by this disconnected pageant is that Dickinson’s life on Earth was far closer to hell.

——

“Because I Could Not Stop: An Encounter With Emily Dickinson”

Through Oct. 21 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; 212-279-4200, romanticcentury.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.

By James Melo; directed by Donald T. Sanders; sets and costumes by Vanessa James; lighting by Beverly Emmons; projections by David Bengali; general management by Aaron Grant Theatrical; production manager, Bill Toles; production stage manager, Paul Blankenship. Presented by Ensemble for the Romantic Century, Eve Wolf, executive artistic director, Max Barros, co-artistic director, James Melo, musicologist, Donald T. Sanders, director of theatrical productions.

Cast: Angelica Page, Kristina Bachrach, Victoria Lewis, Mélanie Clapiès, Chieh-Fan Yiu, Ari Evan and Max Barros.