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Full Length Play:
The Honey & The Pang: Haunted by Emily Dickinson
I first got the idea for this play while reading Mabel Loomis Todd and Austin Dickinson’s love letters. It’s interesting that the couple met first for sex in Emily’s dining room after her parents died, and while she was still engaged in her poetic wrestles with Fate, Culture and Sexuality. Emily was a barometer for much more than the emotional surge and flow in just her family; she had been writing about sexual starvation and gender cruelty for thirty years before the inauguration of this affair. I would argue that her famous reclusiveness allowed her to build a “power cell” of the type coveted by mystics, hermits and cloistered thinkers since the dawn of recorded time. Two plays exist (to my knowledge) about Emily and both dare to put words in her mouth. Emily not only speaks very well for herself, she is a true revolutionary. She speaks for all of us in the best chosen words possible.
The Dickinsons were the local aristocracy. Their power was based on more than reputation and tradition; it focused on money and land. After Emily’s death Mabel Todd became Emily's first editor and forced the world to take notice of these astonishing poems and letters; for that, we must be forever grateful. But Mabel did not stop there, she used her sexual affair with the Squire and her possession of poems and letters (to which she had no copyright) as levers to launch her into the social stratosphere; this backfired in a colorful trial so traumatic she was forced to leave town following Austin’s death. But the daughters of both families kept the feud going into the fifties; Emily’s poetry had become just another power chip.
What would she have thought of this, I wondered? She was amazingly clear- sighted about hypocrisy, human potential, helplessness, rage, humiliation and despair. But it as not until I had a sudden vision of Emily’s ghost as a sort of Jules Feiffer modern dancer, weaving through and commenting on the action, that this play jelled for me.
Emily set herself free in her own lifetime. I think she still has the ability to perform that necessary service for us.
The Dickinsons were the local aristocracy. Their power was based on more than reputation and tradition; it focused on money and land. After Emily’s death Mabel Todd became Emily's first editor and forced the world to take notice of these astonishing poems and letters; for that, we must be forever grateful. But Mabel did not stop there, she used her sexual affair with the Squire and her possession of poems and letters (to which she had no copyright) as levers to launch her into the social stratosphere; this backfired in a colorful trial so traumatic she was forced to leave town following Austin’s death. But the daughters of both families kept the feud going into the fifties; Emily’s poetry had become just another power chip.
What would she have thought of this, I wondered? She was amazingly clear- sighted about hypocrisy, human potential, helplessness, rage, humiliation and despair. But it as not until I had a sudden vision of Emily’s ghost as a sort of Jules Feiffer modern dancer, weaving through and commenting on the action, that this play jelled for me.
Emily set herself free in her own lifetime. I think she still has the ability to perform that necessary service for us.
