My Poems, My Immortality

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How Red the Fire, by David Starkey. At SBCC’s Fé Bland Forum, Saturday, February 24. Shows through March 3.

Reviewed by Bojana Hill

David Starkey’s imaginative play How Red the Fire blends truth and fiction to unveil the mystery of Emily Dickinson’s genius and to reflect on her losses and regrets. Set in 1886 Amherst, Massachusetts, and in a present-day university in Southern California, How Red the Fire asks what would have happened if Dickinson’s poems had been burned. Would her talent have sunk into oblivion, unrecognized?

To American literature professor Anna Young, this loss would have been irreparable. She is a passionate advocate for Emily Dickinson’s poetry. The play opens as Teddy, a college student who thinks a minor in English is “cool,” but who “doesn’t get” Dickinson, consults with Young about his paper. The edgy repartee between professor and student provides humorous and at times satirical commentary on a cultural gap all too familiar to educators. While Seth Baumhover convincingly portrays a lackadaisical college student, the spirited Serena Bottiani embodies a young, ambitious university professor who is pleased to have tenure, but frustrated at her lack of appreciation and understanding — perhaps echoing Dickinson’s own sentiments more than a century earlier.

When the scene switches to the past, Emily and her sister Lavinia (Kelly Peinado) are enjoying solitary domestic bliss. Although she is already ill and relies on a cane to walk, Emily radiates calmness and gentleness. The talented Michelle Osborne depicts Emily as a complex character who is at once fragile, independent, and fierce. Whether lamenting the lack of a publisher for her poetry or embracing single life, Emily is dignified, intelligent, and kind. Her sister, Lavinia, with whom Emily lived happily until her death in 1886, is loving and supportive — an intellectual equal who recognizes Emily’s poetic genius, saying, “Your gift will justify each transgression …”

In the second half of the play, the “what if” scenario is imagined: What if Lavinia, who relentlessly pursued publication for her sister’s poems, perished in a fire, along with all of Emily’s works? The prospect is grim: Emily lives in a boarding house in Cambridge, alone and forgotten. Having never recovered from the tragedy, Emily is unable to write. The modern-day setting is just as dismal. Professor Young mourns the loss of tenure and the loss of Dickinson’s poetry. Her final speech expresses a deep longing for “what might have been.” Under sensitive direction by Jinny Webber, the play thus intuits that women’s creative endeavors are inextricably tied with their predecessors whose legacies have paved the way.

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