Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath October 27, 1932 -  February 11, 1963

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

Novelist and poet from Boston Massachusetts. Died in London. Her mother, Aurelia Schober, was a master’s student at Boston University when she met Plath’s father, Otto Plath, who was her professor. They were married in January of 1932. Otto taught both German and biology.

In 1940, when Plath was eight years old, her father died as a result of complications from diabetes. He had been a strict father, and both his authoritarian attitudes and his death drastically defined her relationships and her poems—most notably in her most infamous poem "Daddy."

Even in her youth, Plath was ambitiously driven to succeed. She kept a journal from the age of eleven and published her poems in regional magazines and newspapers. Her first national publication was in the Christian Science Monitor in 1950, just after graduating from high school.

In 1950, Plath matriculated at Smith College. She was an exceptional student, and despite a deep depression she went through in 1953 and a subsequent suicide attempt, she managed to graduate in 1955. After graduation, Plath moved to Cambridge, England, on a Fulbright Scholarship. In early 1956, she attended a party and met the English poet Ted Hughes. Shortly thereafter, Plath and Hughes were married, on June 16, 1956.
Sylvia Plath had her first collection of poetry, The Colossus, published in England in 1960. That same year, she gave birth to her first child; Freida. Two years later, Plath and Hughes welcomed their first boy; Nicholas. Unfortunately, the couple's marriage was failing apart. After Hughes left her for another woman in 1962, Sylvia Plath fell into a deep depression. Struggling with her mental illness, she wrote The Bell Jar in 1963, her only novel, which was based on her life and deals with the mental breakdown and return to sanity of Esther Greenwood. Plath published the novel under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. She also created the poems that would make up the collection Ariel (1965), which was released after her death. Sylvia Plath committed suicide on February 11, 1963.

We're trying to explore through our pieces how people hide behind fronts and material things from their insecurities and irrationality. 

Minute solo performance

Physical minute performance about mental health shoelace bipolar reactions rolling back and forth into different dimensions non naturalized reactions 

Soundscape counting 

Total theatre solo pieces on Sylvia Plath

Jilted

My thoughts are crabbed and sallow,
My tears like vinegar,
Or the bitter blinking yellow
Of an acetic star.

Tonight the caustic wind, love,
Gossips late and soon,
And I wear the wry-faced pucker of
The sour lemon moon.

While like an early summer plum,
Puny, green, and tart,
Droops upon its wizened stem
My lean, unripened heart.