New Play in Manhattan

Eastward in Eden (by Dorothy Gardner; produced by Nancy Stern) is the third play (the others: Alison's House, Brittle Heaven) to treat of New England's renowned recluse, Poetess Emily Dickinson (1830-86). By now it should be clear that Emily, whose life was as inward as it was intense, is not the likeliest sort of figure for the public glare of the stage.*

Eastward in Eden is mostly concerned with what made her a recluse. According to Playwright Gardner, it was her unrequited love for Charles Wadsworth, a married Philadelphia clergyman. Even as a stage romance, there was very little story. Emily (attractively played by Beatrice Straight) met Wadsworth (Onslow Stevens) when she was 23. In the next few years they corresponded regularly and met briefly at intervals. Then Wadsworth prudently bowed out and went off to a distant pulpit in California.

After that, the once vivacious Emily led a partly shattered, wholly shuttered existence. She never again left her house and garden. Her life became the hundreds & hundreds of poems--many without form but few without magical phrasing--that made her, among other things, a "humorist of agony." Playwright Gardner writes of Emily appreciatively enough, but Eastward in Eden is neither very poetic nor very dramatic, and is often downright dull.

* A likelier figure for the printed page, Emily Dickinson has been the subject of many critical studies and four full-length biographies: the first by Emily's niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi (1924); a second by Josephine Pollitt (1930); No. 3 by Poetess Genevieve Taggard (1934); and the latest by Professor George Whicher of Amherst College (1938).

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