Crouse proves a captivating 'Belle'

GLOUCESTER -- Lindsay Crouse is best known for playing hard-bitten types -- contemporary women with an aggressive edge -- on TV police procedurals and in films such as 1987's "House of Games," written by her then-husband, David Mamet. It's a revelation to see her as "The Belle of Amherst" -- Emily Dickinson, the reclusive 19th-century poet who spent her entire life in a rural town, quietly creating small masterpieces within the confines of her bedroom.

Crouse pours her entire being into this constrained role, which playwright William Luce created as a one-woman tour de force for Julie Harris in 1976. Crouse is easily Harris's match, carefully modulating her voice into tight yet lyrical Yankee rhythms. Her hands repeatedly return like doves to the waist of her spotless white lawn dress to smooth out a nonexistent wrinkle. Yes, Dickinson may present herself as "plain -- and small, like the wren," but her inner life burns with a passion worthy of a great romantic. Like the writing nuns who were her spiritual and literary forebears, Dickinson finds herself in a state of ecstasy over the quotidian joys of a circumscribed life.

Spinning about her sparsely accoutered room (designer Jenna McFarland Lord cleverly decided to stage it "slant," tipping the platform toward the audience and thereby creating a more intimate feeling), Dickinson recalls and reenacts snippets from her past -- from encounters with nosy neighbors to an ego-crushing meeting with her editor from "The Atlantic." She admits that when townspeople come to visit so they can catch a peek of her, her wont is to "run upstairs two steps at a time" and hide. Yet for the purposes of the play, she has essentially invited the audience in for tea, sharing not only the recipe for her much-admired black cake but the innermost secrets of her soul -- what delights her, distresses her, prompts the outpourings of poetry.

How engrossed you become in the proceedings may well depend on how captivated you are by Dickinson's musings presented in so heaping a helping (sometimes it seems as if every other word is "little": She has a tendency toward the precious, bordering on twee, and exhibits an over-insistent modesty). Still, her greatest hits -- from "I'm Nobody!" to " 'Hope' is the thing with feathers" -- are worked in with commendable grace, and Crouse invests these pa ssages with a captivating intensity.

Dickinson may have intentionally led a tidy, tightly restricted life -- "I've never had to go anywhere to find my paradise," she remarks -- but its simplicity does appeal, especially with a maid on hand to attend to life's more onerous chores. A room of one's own, with plenty of time for contemplation, exerts a certain allure, even as our lives grow ever more frantic. It's lovely to have this opportunity to spend a few hours in the company of a meek yet celebratory soul, an "inebriate of air" capable of experiencing paroxy s ms of joy over the merest sunrise or a warbler trilling at the bottom of the garden.