THE BELLE OF AMHERST, Laboratory Theatre, at the Chopin Theatre. “Paradise is never a journey,” declared Emily Dickinson. And according to William Luce’s celebrated one-woman portrait of the poet, Dickinson found paradise in a lifelong retreat from people. (Too shy to admit she didn’t know how to tell time, she learned only when she was 15.) She saw just seven poems published in her lifetime and feared her verse would never travel through space, let alone time. But her isolation allowed her to re-create a different and in some ways truer world. Luce shows us a poet caught in the art, ignoring the “facts” for the “phosphorescence.” He also reveals her poring over grisly newspaper stories, tending her garden, making small and large talk with her father, brother, sister, tutor–and with the Atlantic Monthly editor who was her one gentleman caller.
