Words, Words, Words: Shows Where Poets Are Portrayed on Stage

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of The Belle of Amherst, William Luce’s spellbinding play wherein one woman portrays the poet Emily Dickinson as she recollects her past through her words, diaries and letters, Breaking Character presents a celebration of shows where the great lyricists of our time are portrayed on stage. From stirring examinations of the passions and romances that inspired these great wordsmiths to nuanced biographies and even alternate histories, these works honor the power of poetry and of its creators. Transportive and emotive, these shows prove that words can come to magical, theatrical life on stage.

Emily Dickinson

Largely unpublished and unknown during her own lifetime, Emily Dickinson is now considered to be one of the great American playwrights. With sharp descriptions that pierce the heart of human relationships and exquisite command of meter and rhyme, Dickinson’s works (often known by their first lines given that she left many of them untitled) are among the most-quoted and most-beloved in the poetic canon. Giving new life to the dash and the slant rhyme, the poet behind “Because I could not stop for death–” has only seen her reputation grow across the 20th and 21st centuries.

The Belle of Amherst by William Luce (US)
(Full-Length Play, Drama / 1w) 
Premiering on Broadway at the Longacre Theatre on April 28, 1976, William Luce’s comprehensive and emotionally riveting overview of Emily Dickinson’s life is a wonderful tribute to a giant of American poetry. Luce’s Dickinson is a joy for a strong woman actor to play – warm, human, loving and lovable – and commands the stage through the power of the poet’s writing. Through verbatim quotations from her work, diaries and letters, William Luce’s classic play shows us both the pain and the passion of Dickinson’s secluded life.

Emilia Bassano

Emilia Bassano (also known as Emilia Lanier) was a trailblazer in every sense of the world. In 1611, Bassano published the first collection of poetry written by a woman in England. All the poems contained therein were dedicated to women, while the collection’s centerpiece – “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum” – told the story of Christ’s crucifixion from a distinct point of view. As such, her groundbreaking work was also a milestone for early feminism and for women’s independence in the Elizabethan era. Had she never written anything else, she would still have been an important literary figure, but as Emilia supposes, she may very well have been the “Dark Lady” that inspired so many of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Emilia by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Comedy / 13w) 
The little we know of Emilia Bassano is restricted to the possibility that she may have been the “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s Sonnets – and the rest of Her Story has been erased by History. This witty and lively play for an all-femme cast commissioned specifically for Shakespeare’s Globe reveals the life of Emilia: poet, mother and feminist. This time, the focus will be on the exceptional woman who managed to outlive all the men the history books tethered her to. Soon to be available for licensing, Emilia explores the life of a woman of considerable influence on and off-stage.

Aphra Behn

Writing under the pseudonym Astrea (the ancient Greek goddess of justice), Aphra Behn was a pioneering female poet and writer in the Restoration era. Seemingly a fusion of many of the biographical details of her predecessors – a spy like Marlowe, an early feminist like Emilia Bassano, a polymath like Shakespeare – yet lesser known than them all, Aphra Behn gained a reputation after her death. Three centuries later, Virginia Woolf wrote admiringly in A Room of One’s Own that “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn.”

Or, by Liz Duffy Adams (US)
(Full-Length Play, Dramatic Comedy / 2w, 1m)
Aphra Behn: poet, spy and soon-to-be the first professional female playwright. Sprung from debtors’ prison after a disastrous overseas mission, Aphra is desperate to get out of the spy trade. She has a shot at a production at one of only two London companies, if she can only finish her play by morning. She faces interruptions from her sudden new love, actress Nell Gwynne; her complicated royal love, King Charles II; and her very dodgy ex-love, double-agent William Scot – who may be in on a plot to murder the king in the morning. Can Aphra resist Nell’s charms, save Charles’ life, win William a pardon and launch her career, all in one night?

Lord Byron

A leading figure in the Romantic movement, which focused on sweeping emotion and lyrical forms in response to the more regimented customs of the Enlightenment period, Lord Byron led a tumultuous life that matched the wild abandon of his poetry. From keeping a bear as a pet while a student at Cambridge to fighting in the Greek War of Independence (and becoming revered as a folk hero for it), Byron was never far from flights of fancy. Works like Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage created the figure of the “Byronic hero,” while Byron’s shameless self-promotion and myth-making led to the coining of the term “Byromania.” He also was the father of Ada Lovelace, a pioneering mathematician and writer who became one of the earliest known computer scientists.

Ada and the Engine by Lauren Gunderson (US)
(Full-Length Play, Drama / 2w, 2m) 
As the British Industrial Revolution dawns, young Ada Byron Lovelace (daughter of the flamboyant and notorious Lord Byron) sees the boundless creative potential in the “analytic engines” of her friend and soulmate Charles Babbage, inventor of the first mechanical computer. Ada envisions a whole new world where art and information converge – a world she might not live to see. This is a music-laced story of love, friendship and the edgiest dreams of the future.

Allen Ginsberg (and others)

Part of the New York Beat poets, Allen Ginsberg spoke out powerfully through his poetry against what he saw as the spiritual and moral failings of the United States government. In his most famous poem, “Howl,” which Ginsberg called “a lament for the Lamb in America,” he critiqued the capitalist structured that governed American society, leading to a 1957 obscenity trial in which the poem only escaped banning due to being found to have redeeming artistic value. A hero of the counterculture, Ginsberg was a poet who always sought to reflect the psyches of those he saw around him in the street, those “best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.”

beat. a play on words by Kelly Groves (US)
(Full-Length Play, Drama / 7m) 
Part docudrama, part poetry slam, part musical jam-session, beat. examines the life of Allen Ginsberg, one of this country’s most controversial and beloved poets, and the famous obscenity trial surrounding the publication of one of his most celebrated works, “Howl.”

A.E. Housman

Best known for his 1896 collection A Shropshire Lad, A.E. Housman was a gifted classicist and poet whose work enraptured young adults of the Late Victorian age. The collection, which portrayed the life of the titular, rural lad from adolescence to the grave, was a popular smash, with almost 100 English editions being produced in its first 50 years of existence. Housman’s modernizing of pastoral poetry, which proved it could still speak to the concerns of the post-industrial age, was treasured by his contemporaries (Oscar Wilde received an autographed copy) and by generations of readers to come.

The Invention of Love by Tom Stoppard (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Drama / 1w, 22m)
It’s 1936, and A. E. Housman is being ferried across the Styx, glad to be dead at last. His memories, however, are dramatically alive. The river flowing through this play connects Hades with the Oxford of Housman’s early manhood, where high Victorianism in art, literature and morality is being challenged by the aesthetic movement and an Irish student called Wilde is about to burst onto the scene. The Invention of Love uses the free form of memory to explore Housman’s passions, loves and inspirations.

Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop

Members of the Confessional school, which revolutionized American poetry in the 1950s and 1960s by introducing more intimate forms of address and including the poet’s own self as narrator, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop were introduced to each other in 1947. Over the next 30 years, the two New Englanders carried out a correspondence that reflected the passion with which these two approached the craft of poetry. After Lowell’s death, Bishop would write, “Our friendship, [which was] often kept alive through years of separation only by letters, remained constant and affectionate, and I shall always be deeply grateful for it.”

Dear Elizabeth by Sarah Ruhl (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Drama / 1w, 1m, 1 any gender) 
Basing her play on the compiled letters between poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, Sarah Ruhl expresses the beauty in simple correspondence. Brought to life by reading Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, the drama maps the relationship of the two poets from first meeting to an abbreviated affair and the turmoil of their lives in between.

Christopher Marlowe

Much like his compatriot William Shakespeare, Marlowe was one of the great literary talents of the Elizabethan era (so much so that certain theories insist that he co-wrote much of Shakespeare’s work). In poems like Hero and Leander, Marlowe used his command of blank verse to become one of the major popular successes of the age. However, his life off-stage (as explored in Kit Marlowe) may have been more thrilling than his poetic narratives. Rumored to be a spy, a libeler and a heretic, Marlowe was the source of constant intrigue. However, his tabloid escapades should not obscure the magnificence of his words and the iconic characters (Doctor Faustus, Tamburlaine) they brought to life.

Kit Marlowe by David Grimm (US)
(Full-Length Play, Drama / 12m)
Hungry for adventure and a way to make his mark, poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe becomes a spy for a dark wing of the British government and subsequently seals his hero Sir Walter Raleigh’s fate – and his own. Set in the seedy underworld of Elizabethan England, this story of the meteoric rise and fall of Kit Marlowe – playwright, poet, spy and sexual outlaw – charts the ambitions of youth in a cold and unforgiving world.

Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon

Both noted for their horrifying and moving First World War poetry, Owen and Sassoon created work that mourned the loss of a generation of young British men who lost their lives during the miserable trench warfare of 1914-18. Owen considered the slightly older Sassoon a mentor, both in poetry and in life, and their affection for each other had a profound impact on their lives. When Owen was sadly killed in action only one week before the signing of the Armistice, Sassoon was left devastated, writing that he now had “a chasm in my private existence.”

Not About Heroes by Stephen MacDonald (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Drama / 2m)
“Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori,” facetiously penned British poet Wilfred Owen, who was soon to die in the Great War. Translated, the phrase reads, “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” This moving play is about the poetic life and the inner relationship between two of the finest Great War poets: Owen, who died, and Siegfried Sassoon, who didn’t. Told by means of letters and poetry, Not About Heroes paints a vivid picture of the war.

Sarah Ruhl and Max Ritvo

Although more known for her critically-acclaimed playwriting – including Pulitzer Prize nominations for The Clean House (US/UK) and In The Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) (US/UK)– Sarah Ruhl is also an accomplished poet, with the “astonishments, surprises and mysteries” (New Yorker) that characterize her stage work also present when she turns her eye to the poetic. The sadly deceased Max Ritvo, on the other hand, was a prodigiously talented poet who studied under Louise Glück and Ruhl herself before passing from Ewing’s Sarcoma in 2016. His moving meditations on his illness formed the backbone of the posthumously released Letters from Max.

Letters from Max by Sarah Ruhl and Max Ritvo (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Drama / 1w, 1m) 
An adaptation of Sarah Ruhl and Max Ritvo’s 2018 epistolary book, Letters from Max: A Poet, a Teacher, a Friendship, this intimate, poetic play explores the relationship between Sarah and her former student, Max. With humor, lyricism and candor, the two friends share letters and poems as Max faces terminal illness and tests poetry’s capacity to put to words what otherwise feels ineffable.

Edgar Allan Poe

Spooky season owes a lot to Edgar Allan Poe. A master of macabre gothic fiction, puzzle-like detective fiction and spine-tingling supernatural poetry like “The Raven,” Poe was an American icon whose work has been adapted countless times across numerous forms of media. Due to the complicated nature of his personal life, the circumstances of Poe’s death – the death certificate which would have given a cause of death has never been found – have been the subject of much speculation, as seen in our next featured title. Fitting for a poet who wrote of “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.”

Nevermore: The Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe by Johnathan Christenson (US/UK)
(Full-Length Musical, Drama / 3w, 4m + ensemble) 
The literary rock star of his day, Poe struggles with tragedy and addiction, poverty and loss yet produces some of the world’s most original, visionary and enduring literature before dying in unexplained circumstances at the age of 40. At once gorgeous and grotesque, Nevermore explores the events that shape Poe’s character and career, blurring the line between fact and fiction – after all, as Poe himself writes, “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”

Sylvia Plath

In her brief yet incredibly important poetic career, Sylvia Plath created some of the most emotionally powerful works in the Confessional school. Collections like The Colossus and Other Poems, along with the posthumously-released Ariel and Collected Poems, established her reputation as one of the great chroniclers of interior turmoil and darkness. Unfortunately, many of these poems’ subjects were directly drawn from her lifelong struggle with depression, which caused her to take her own life at the age of 30. Her 1982 Pulitzer Prize, which was awarded more than two decades after her passing, was a laurel appropriate to her influence on the world of poetry.

Letters Home by Rose Leiman Goldemberg (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Drama / 2w) 
Letters Home explores the enigma of Sylvia Plath’s life, dramatizing correspondence between the poet and her mother Aurelia. Every line of this engrossing drama comes from these letters, evoking a gripping and powerful portrait of the woman, artist, daughter and mother. A touching tribute to a titan of poetry, the play brings Plath’s intimate writings into the light.

William Shakespeare

What more is there to say about William Shakespeare? Almost certainly the most-performed playwright in history, William Shakespeare created dozens of works that rank among the most famous and critically-beloved in Western literature. Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the list goes on and on. All over the world, the Bard of Avon’s words (including his 154 sonnets) have inspired, thrilled and delighted. Oh, and he also wrote Romeo and Juliet. But how? Our next suggestion has some ideas…

Shakespeare in Love by Lee Hall, based on the screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard (US/UK)
(Full-Length Play, Dramatic Comedy / 6w, 18m) 
Young Will Shakespeare has writer’s block. The deadline for his new play is fast approaching, but he’s in desperate need of inspiration. That is, until he finds his muse… the feisty, brilliant and beautiful Viola. This crafty young woman is Will’s greatest admirer and will stop at nothing (including breaking the law) to appear in his next play. Against a bustling background of mistaken identity, ruthless scheming and backstage theatrics, Will’s love for Viola quickly blossoms, inspiring him to write his greatest romantic masterpiece. Also available in a High School Edition (US/UK).

The Transcendentalists

Composed of poets like Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Transcendentalists were noted for their fascination with nature and with the idea of an everyday divine presence. Developing in New England in the 1820s and 1830s, the movement was one of the first entirely American philosophical and literary currents, while its works were crucial to defining the then-young United States. At heart, Transcendentalists believed that people and nature had inherent goodness, and the discovery of that goodness through communion with the natural world and self-reliance was what gave life meaning.

Romance Language by Peter Parnell (US)
(Full-Length Play, Comedy / 5w, 10m) 
Huck Finn climbs through Walt Whitman’s bedroom window. Since Whitman’s male lover has just died, he decides to go on a picaresque journey with Huck down the river of American culture where they encounter Custer, Thoreau, Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte Cushman and Emily Dickinson. The craziness reaches a climax at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, where everyone is killed and goes to literary heaven in this bravura piece of theatre.

Dylan Thomas

“Do not go gentle into that good night.” Dylan Thomas lived by his words, becoming one of the defining figures of the “troubled poet” whose drinking and bar-room brawling overshadowed the beauty of his modernist poetry. Growing up in Wales, Thomas often took inspiration from the wild landscapes and folktales of his homeland, leading to a great and varied collection of work that included Deaths and Entrances and Under Milk Wood. While his personal struggles eventually led to his death in New York before the age of 40, his reflections on the impermanence and wonder of life continue to be studied.

Dylan by Sidney Michaels, Caitlin Thomas and John M. Brinnin (US)
(Full-Length Play, Drama / 13w, 15m)
Famed poet Dylan Thomas bids farewell to his wife and his beloved Wales to tour the United States. From colleges, bars and bedrooms and finally to the ship that bore his body home, dead at 39, the enigma of this great artist is brought to vivid life.

Oscar Wilde

Wit, aesthete, scholar, poet – Oscar Wilde’s prodigious talent on the page was only matched by his ability to coin a phrase or put someone in their place. The proud Irishman was one of the great dramatists of the 19th century, creating The Importance of Being Earnest and Lady Windermere’s Fan, along with great works of poetry like the moving The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Written while Wilde was under imprisonment for the then-illegal crime of gross indecency (i.e., homosexuality), the poem reflects on the brutal conditions of the British penal system. Despite the horrifying and homophobic punishments Wilde was subjected to, no one could dim the potency of his words or their lasting legacy.  As Wilde himself noted, “I don’t want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.”

Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde by Moisés Kaufman and Stephen Wangh (US)
(Full-Length Play, Drama / 9m) 
In early 1895, the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Wilde’s young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, left a card at Wilde’s club bearing the phrase “posing sodomite.” Wilde sued the Marquess for criminal libel. The defense denounced Wilde’s art and literature as immoral, leading to his conviction for gross indecency. With Wilde’s arrest, his hit plays running in London’s West End were forced to close, and Wilde was reduced to penury. Moisés Kaufman and Stephen Wangh’s historically-drawn drama uses trial transcripts, personal correspondence, interviews and other source materials to tell the story of the poet’s sad downfall.

To discover more shows that focus on writing and art, or to simply browse the collection more fully, visit Concord Theatricals in the US or the UK.