Description
MERCY STREET is Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton’s only play and incorporates many of the themes that infuse her poetry, the deeply personal, the nature of madness, and the subjectivity of truth. “Anne Sexton, a fine poet with an astounding knack for incorporating the ugly and immediate vocabulary of the pressing workaday world into lyrics that nevertheless remain lyrics, is the author of MERCY STREET … The play is constructed quite literally to resemble the Offertory in Anglican or Roman Catholic mass … Miss Sexton’s initial use of ritual is striking … The exploration, in rotating flashbacks, produces some riveting line-images …” -Walter Kerr, The New York Times “… This is Miss Sexton’s first play. She is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, and the tone of her poems has always been laceratingly personal. In some she seemed like a latter-day, neurotic Emily Dickinson. The poems have a voice of their own, and a way with imagery. MERCY STREET is the story of a woman searching her way home from the valley of madness … Miss Sexton has written a play to be considered rather than dismissed …” -Clive Barnes, The New York Times
