Julie Harris is one of our great acting talents and has been for about 60 or 70 years.
Here, she commands the stage in a one-woman play, inhabiting the soul of Emily Dickinson with humor, love, and rage. Harris is superb.
She tells the story of her small life in Amherst with bits and pieces of her iconic poetry. And in so doing she weaves a mesmerizing web of passion maybe unfulfilled, the life of a spinster in a small town in Massachusetts.
And yet the web she weaves is woven of gold and brilliant sunrises and beautiful sunsets. Her unfulfilled life is bursting with love and hope and the love of words.
Julie Harris is simply superb, summoning emotions with the flash of an eye, a flick of a faded shawl, making us a part of Dickinson's 19th-century life. She yearns for love and life and yet accepts life's limitations.
Whether Dickinson was a genius, a hermit, or an idiot savant doesn't really matter. The play and Harris are brimming with love and life.
Bravo to Julie Harris and Charles Nelson Reilly for this amazing treasure.