A LITTLE rickety independent bookshop on Broadway market, The Broadway Bookshop, is probably not the first place one would go to watch a play. But as I arrive and notice the seats are plonked anywhere and everywhere, facing in no particular direction, I can tell this won’t be a conventional play. It was certainly written by an unconventional woman – the great, late Sylvia Plath.
This is Off the Page theatre group’s adaptation of Plath’s 30 minute radio play, ‘Three Women’. The three actresses are positioned among the audience – some facing, some not – so that hearing is the main sense used. Once they start, they use their voices to convey the rhythmic poem in which three women relay their different experiences with pregnancy and motherhood.
Ben Bazell from Off the Page says that they decided to go back to the original listening format after a period of performing it as a stage play: “In the stage production the three women were in a row under three spotlights. There was a lot more movement. But I like it better like this. It’s more stripped back.”
‘Three Women’ was the last play Plath wrote before her death – she killed herself a year later. An inescapable heartbreaking sorrow at being a mother is evident throughout the play; these are issues that were not so acceptable in the 1950s and 1960s when Plath was writing.
The play is far from upbeat. The darkness of Plath’s words and her almost rejection and discomfort with her own motherhood is potent. The cluttered bookshop backdrop adds a layer of intensity to the incredibly claustrophobic weight of the words. But that extra layer represents Plath’s work as it was – raw, sad and beautiful.
