‘Staging Emily Dickinson: The History and Enduring Influence of William Luce’s The Belle of Amherst’
By Grant Hayter-Menzies
McFarland, 232 Pages

This poignant memoir/group biography is about much more than the staging of a play. It is a profound exploration of the poetry of existence as it came to be dramatized in the lives of an actress, a director, and a playwright, and now remembered through the sensibility of a biographer whose own identity has been shaped by their creative communion.

Julie Harris, Charles Nelson Reilly, and William Luce wanted to transform the actress’s dramatic readings of Dickinson’s poetry into a play — even though Harris had never performed alone on a stage, Reilly had never directed a play, and Luce had never written one.

How this triumvirate came together to produce what has become part of the American Stage repertory, even after an inauspicious debut in 1976, becomes the story of how each overcame doubts by trusting one another and, most importantly, by creating an Emily Dickinson, often caricatured as a weird recluse, who is a dominant figure in the American imagination.

An award-winning actress but usually a supporting player, Harris was inspired by Dickinson and wanted to be at center stage; the ebullient Reilly, unable to perform at the highest levels in opera, needed another way to express his extraordinary understanding of stagecraft; and Luce, unable to fulfill his early promise as a classical musician, craved the encouragement of the other two that would later win him accolades for “Lillian,” “Barrymore,” and other biographical dramas. 

I identified with Mr. Hayter-Menzies’s quest for the mentorship that Luce and Harris provided. Harris, in my early days as a biographer of Lillian Hellman, treated me as a collaborator, responding warmly to my questions and comments about her starring role as Joan of Arc in “The Lark” as if I had contributed to the actress’s own desire to reclaim memories of working with the playwright on that production.

Harris, Reilly, and Luce treated Mr. Hayter-Menzies in the same open way when, as a young man, he was trying to make his way in the world. They shared with him the vicissitudes of producing the play, including overcoming the first negative reviews until a second wave of approvals came in for a work that has now been performed all over the world.

When I began writing a one-woman play about one of my biographical subjects, Rebecca West, I turned to Luce for advice, and he was so right:  I needed an actress who would make my work more of a drama, which Anne Bobby accomplished in collaboration with West’s grand niece, Helen Atkinson.

Quite aside from what you will learn about “The Belle of Amherst,” how it came to be, and its reception, this book is about aging, as Mr. Hayter-Menzies shows how Harris, Reilly, and Luce coped gallantly with their waning powers. 

Debilitating illnesses eventually destroyed the ability to write and to perform, yet all three remained part of the biographer’s life, welcoming his friendship and, in Luce’s case, his help when he no longer was able to function independently.

Dickinson’s poetry survived in all of their lives, with Luce, even in late-stage Alzheimer’s, able to recite from her work. 

This is an honest, plain-spoken book that often ascends to eloquence, as Mr. Hayter-Menzies deals with the play’s critics, who worry that turning Dickinson into biographical fodder diminishes her poetry. In their view, it is so much more than the person represented on stage.  

Such criticisms seem beside the point. Who cares if Shakespeare’s “Richard III” is mainly a work of the imagination not to be trusted as history? What’s stopping you from reading history, if that is your preference? To saddle a play with the responsibilities of nonfiction is to vitiate the very idea of what dramatic license is all about.

Besides, books like “Staging Emily Dickinson” provide the recording of facts that literature is always on the way to transcending.

Mr. Rollyson is co-author of two plays, “The Old Character” (with Kevin Cahill) and “That Woman: Rebecca West Remembers” (with Anne Bobby and Helen Atkinson), adaptations of his biographies of Walter Brennan and Rebecca West.