“There’s no need for introduction, do you think?” Kathleen Chalfant asks at the beginning of Rebecca Gilman’s one-act play, A Woman of the World. The actress is speaking in character, as Mabel Loomis Todd, noted for being Emily Dickinson’s posthumous editor, and for her complex relationship with Dickinson’s family—which won’t be revealed in this review, to avoid spoilers for the uninitiated.
But Chalfant might as well be referring to herself. Regular theatergoers, at least, are well acquainted with her extraordinary work on stage, not to mention in films and TV series such as “The Affair” and the “Law & Order” franchise. Under Valentina Fratti’s delicate, incisive direction, she invests Todd, the sole figure in World, with the same graceful authority, wit and empathy that have long distinguished her work—making this world premiere production of Gilman’s sharply written but ultimately slight play well worth seeing.
Gilman made her first big splash in New York nearly two decades ago with Spinning into Butter, one of the most fearless and prophetic plays about racial tensions and political correctness produced in this century. (A 2007 film adaptation starring Sarah Jessica Parker failed to capture its bite.) World is not nearly as provocative or ambitious, though it paints a compelling, good-humored, intermittently moving picture of Todd, whom we meet at a reading she is giving to promote her newly edited and expanded collection of Dickinson’s poems.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★ review here.]
The intimate space provided at 59E59 Theaters certainly suggests the play’s setting, the parlor of an inn in Maine, which set designer Cate McCrae has made cozy with piles of books and wooden furniture. Candice Donnelly costumes Chalfant (per Gilman’s instructions) in a cotton dress and beads, which the actress wears with predictable elegance, looking every bit the distinguished New England matron. It’s a role that Todd certainly plays to the hilt, pointing out that her Harvard-educated, well-married daughter and collaborator is attending the event—in one of the play’s more contrived touches, Todd addresses her grown child repeatedly, often making the latter recoil—and mentioning her husband of many years, an accomplished astronomer.
Of her relationship with Dickinson, Todd says: “Did I discover her? No…Did I rescue her from the darkness of obscurity and force the world to sit up and recognize her singular, searing genius? To that I would humbly say, ‘Yes.'” She adds: “Some people will say that I have no right to claim any role in Emily’s success. That I’m an interloper. An opportunist. A bounder. But let me tell you: those people who say that, are, all of them—small-minded, prudish little—specks of inconsequence.”
But as Todd drifts further from her appointed task of actually reading some of the poems she has championed (and edited to some criticism, that Todd inserted her own voice too much), the haughty airs that Chalfant captures to delicious effect give way to something more wistful. Elements of the story she is selling us are revealed to be less than truthful, by the saleswoman herself. It’s as if in addressing a crowd that is presumably sympathetic, Todd feels freer—safer, perhaps—to reveal her desires and disappointments, and Chalfant makes this shift subtle and lovely.
Through her whole life, Todd finally admits, “I’ve had to push and insert myself and scrabble to get what I wanted…But lately—tonight, even—especially tonight—I find my own insignificance on this island to be something of a relief.” I don’t know enough about Todd’s personal history to say how much of Gilman’s own imagination shaped this portrait, but as Chalfant colors it in, at least, it’s an engrossing piece.
A Woman of the World opened October 30, 2019, at 59E59 and runs through November 17. Tickets and information: 59e59.org
