Monique Fowler as Elizabeth Bishop: The Gossip of Self-Doubt

The latest incarnation of Monique Fowler’s “The Other Life” debuted at The Cell Theater on Sunday evening.  Fowler’s play is a tribute to Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell’s friendship, featuring Fowler (left) as Bishop and John Wojda as Lowell. The script draws from the first decade of letters in the highly acclaimed collection "Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell," (ed. Thomas Travisano) and weaves in fragments of their poems.

If poetry is a dying art form, the letter is a relic.  The letters of Bishop and Lowell frolic between gossip, visits to Pound in the hospital or to Hemingway’s swimming pool, and personal distresses including Bishop’s battle with alcohol and Lowell’s emotional mania.  Such anecdotes divulge not just the experiences of these great poets, but their thoughts about their personal and writing lives.  Fowler and Wojda expressed the poets' self-doubt and loneliness as well as their wit.  As they recited the letters they turned to one another coyly, extending the affection and humor of the language to the stage. 

While Bishop sits at Yaddo, the artists' colony, “blowing bubbles,”Lowell carries her poem, “The Armadillo” around in his wallet. Bishop reacted with cool rationality to Lowell's romantic longings.  In a notable letter Lowell wrote, “I assumed that [it] would be a matter of time before I proposed and I half believed that you would accept…The possible alternatives that life allows us are very few…But asking you is the one might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had.”  While romance is always intriguing, the substance of this relationship was defined by pen and ink.  The physical distance dividing Bishop and Lowell distinguished their camaraderie and even devotion, which comes through particularly well in this dramatic reading. 

In addition to coupling the letters with lines from their poetry, Monique Fowler included an outstanding variety of slides that were projected behind the actors throughout the performance.  The photographs revealed the poets themselves, the scrawl of their writing, and the ever-captivating views of New England seaports.  The harbor shots served as a reminder of the distance between the poets with Bishop writing from Brazil while Lowell remained on the east coast.  Bishop's diary entries annotate a brief visit she made to Maine. Fowler’s efforts to collage these entries with the poems, letters and Bishop’s memoir were truly impressive.  During the Q & A an audience member asked if Fowler was an historian, and she laughed, saying, “No, I’m an actress who loves poetry.”  Fowler’s appreciation across the arts brought poets, actors and letter-writers together for a memorable evening.  I suspect this performance will inspire many to read the newly collected letters, and to bask in re-reading the poems themselves.  Brava!

-- Elizabeth Powers Howort