Written and Directed by Blake Brooker

Performed by the One Yellow Rabbit Ensemble

Staged by Denise Clarke

Premiering at the 22nd annual High Performance Rodeo.
Five shows only - January 8 to 12, 2008 at the Vertigo Playhouse Theatre.

One Yellow Rabbit's newest original work presents a seductive look at the poetry and passions of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, two intense souls who attempted to escape the straitjacketed social norms of their time through a cathartic flow of ink and emotion. Sylvia Plath Must Not Die offers a compelling glimpse into the lives of two of the 20th century's most prolific and complex literary figures, conflicted women whose sexual and intellectual appetites were often at odds with their prescribed roles as mothers and wives. Despite enjoying remarkable success in their field, both would eventually succumb to their demons and commit suicide; Plath in 1963 and Sexton in 1974.

Tackling themes of power, madness, extinction and survival, Sylvia Plath Must Not Die probes the troubled lives of two artists whose poetic cries continue to ring out through the decades. Using the text of Plath and Sexton's work as a springboard, the award-winning One Yellow Rabbit Ensemble invites audiences on a voyeuristic journey into another era, where cocktails are swilled and frustrations are pounded out on the keys of typewriters. In this meditation on revenge and ambition, wonder and betrayal, company members portray the two writers and their husbands, looking through the stereotype of the tortured poet to see and hear what is on the other side of the conventional interpretation.

Sylvia Plath:

• Sylvia Plath's haunting and personal poems and her tragic life story have placed her in the pantheon of contemporary American poets.Plath grew up outside Boston, graduated from Smith College and attended Cambridge University in England on a Fulbright Scholarship.
• In 1956 she married English poet Ted Hughes and, after a brief period teaching at Smith, settled in Devon, England. In 1960 she published her first collection of poems as The Colossus to favorable reviews, but her marriage to Hughes dissolved and Plath moved to London with her two children.
• Between 1961 and 1963 she wrote dozens of poems, but continued to struggle with a mental illness that had already caused her to attempt suicide twice. In 1962 her play Three Women was performed on BBC, and her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, was published under a pseudonym.
• In February of 1963 Plath gassed herself to death with her kitchen oven.
• Most of her published works appeared posthumously, including Ariel (1965), Winter Trees (1972) and Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1979, a collection of short fiction). In 1981 The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath was published, edited by Hughes; it won a Pulitzer Prize in 1982

Click the image for a video clip of Pursuit

Pursuit

There is a panther stalks me down:
One day I'll have my death of him;
His greed has set the woods aflame,
He prowls more lordly than the sun.
Most soft, most suavely glides that step,
Advancing always at my back;
From gaunt hemlock, rooks croak havoc:
The hunt is on, and sprung the trap.
Flayed by thorns I trek the rocks,
Haggard through the hot white noon.
Along red network of his veins
What fires run, what craving wakes?

Insatiate, he ransacks the land
Condemned by our ancestral fault,
Crying: blood, let blood be spilt;
Meat must glut his mouth's raw wound.
Keen the rending teeth and sweet
The singeing fury of his fur;
His kisses parch, each paw's a briar,
Doom consummates that appetite.
In the wake of this fierce cat,
Kindled like torches for his joy,
Charred and ravened women lie,
Become his starving body's bait.

Now hills hatch menace, spawning shade;
Midnight cloaks the sultry grove;
The black marauder, hauled by love
On fluent haunches, keeps my speed.
Behind snarled thickets of my eyes
Lurks the lithe one; in dreams' ambush
Bright those claws that mar the flesh
And hungry, hungry, those taut thights.
His ardor snares me, lights the trees,
And I run flaring in my skin;
What lull, what cool can lap me in
When burns and brands that yellow gaze?

I hurl my heart to halt his pace,
To quench his thirst I squander blook;
He eats, and still his need seeks food,
Compels a total sacrifice.
His voice waylays me, spells a trance,
The gutted forest falls to ash;
Appalled by secret want, I rush
From such assault of radiance.
Entering the tower of my fears,
I shut my doors on that dark guilt,
I bolt the door, each door I bolt.
Blood quickens, gonging in my ears:

The panther's tread is on the stairs,
Coming up and up the stairs.

Anne Sexton:

• Name at birth: Anne Gray Harvey
• Anne Sexton married at the age of 19, worked briefly as a model and then started a family. Sexton suffered from depression and had mental breakdowns and suicidal bouts after the births of her children and the deaths of her parents.
• In the late 1950s she began writing poetry as therapy and was soon "discovered" by the literary world for her unapologetically autobiographical poems.The recipient of many awards and grants, she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for Live or Die.
• In 1974 she committed suicide.

Click the image for a video clip of For My Lover, Returning to His Wife

For My Lover, Returning to His Wife

She is all there.
She was melted carefully down for you
and cast up from your childhood,
cast up from your one hundred favorite aggies.

She has always been there, my darling.
She is, in fact, exquisite.
Fireworks in the dull middle of February
and as real as a cast-iron pot.

Let's face it, I have been momentary.
A luxury. A bright red sloop in the harbor.
My hair rising like smoke from the car window.
Littleneck clams out of season.

She is more than that. She is your have to have,
has grown you your practical your tropical growth.
This is not an experiment. She is all harmony.
She sees to oars and oarlocks for the dinghy,

has placed wild flowers at the window at breakfast,
sat by the potter's wheel at midday,
set forth three children under the moon,
three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo,

done this with her legs spread out
in the terrible months in the chapel.
If you glance up, the children are there
like delicate balloons resting on the ceiling.

She has also carried each one down the hall
after supper, their heads privately bent,
two legs protesting, person to person,
her face flushed with a song and their little sleep.

I give you back your heart.
I give you permission—

for the fuse inside her, throbbing
angrily in the dirt, for the bitch in her
and the burying of her wound—
for the burying of her small red wound alive—

for the pale flickering flare under her ribs,
for the drunken sailor who waits in her left pulse,
for the mother's knee, for the stockings,
for the garter belt, for the call—

the curious call
when you will burrow in arms and breasts
and tug at the orange ribbon in her hair
and answer the call, the curious call.

She is so naked and singular.
She is the sum of yourself and your dream.
Climb her like a monument, step after step.
She is solid.

As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off.

Click the image for a video clip introducing the husbands

Alfred “Kayo” Muller Sexton II:

• Son of a wealthy family he eloped with and married Anne Sexton on August 16, 1948.
• Kayo and Anne moved to Hamilton, New York, where Kayo was attending Colgate, University. Unable to afford making a living and supporting a wife, Kayo decided that they should move back to Massachusetts where he joined the naval reserve and shipped out on the USS Boxer to Korea.
• In 1952, Kayo came home for a year after the Boxer received war damage. It was during this time that Anne and Kayo conceived their first child. In July 1953, shortly after Kayo had been shipped out again, Anne gave birth to Linda Gray Sexton.
• Later that year Kayo was discharged and he returned home where he and Anne purchased a home in Newton Lower Falls, Massachusetts, not far from either of their parents.
• They divorced in 1973.

Ted Hughes:

• The son of shopkeepers, he studied at Cambridge University.
• He married the American poet Sylvia Plath in 1956.
• His first volumes of verse were The Hawk in the Rain (1957) and Lupercal (1960).
• After Plath's 1963 suicide he wrote little for three years, then began publishing prolifically, often in collaboration with illustrators or photographers. His collections include Wodwo (1967), Crow (1970), Cave Birds (1975), Gaudete (1977), and Wolf Watching (1989).
• His most characteristic work emphasizes the cunning and savagery of animal life in harsh, sometimes disjunctive lines. He wrote many volumes for children (including The Iron Man, 1968) and edited the journal Modern Poetry in Translation.
• In 1984 he became Britain's poet laureate.
• Birthday Letters (1998), published shortly before his death, consists of revealing poems about his relationship with Plath.