Most playwrights, unfettered by the actual facts of their subject's life as we have here in the disclaimer, "Historically Inaccurate", create a more dramatic, enhanced picture of it. However, Sarah Schulcman's drama, based on Carson McCullers' life, but not confined to it, is less dramatic than the actual life story of novelist/playwright. Perhaps because its author is primarily a novelist, her play, about an extraordinary writer, an "enfant terrible" of the literary world, lacks as much passion as its heroine claims to have lacked in her life.

We meet Carson as a precocious 14 year old, smoking and reading all kinds of inappropriately sophisticated books. As they listen to music Carson's indulgent mother exhales such Southern profundities as "sex takes place where you sit down, music takes place when you sit down". Instead of sharing their  visiting neighbors' obsession with the hereafter, Carson exhibits a very real tantrum (the most disturbing scene in the play) when her passion for the piano is threatened as her teacher leaves her. So unrestrained is this outburst (as allowed by the equally indulgent director, Marion McClinton) that one wonders if she is, indeed, abnormal. Later she utters, almost without preamble, "I'm a boy".

Carson seemingly gets over this in the next scene, her wedding night to the handsome young writer Reeve (Rick Stear). Ill fated from its inception, Carson, avoiding connubial consummation, flees to writing her journal as if to capture the feeling rather than the actuality of the experience. Undaunted, Reeve marvels "I think you're a real life Bette Davis. Bette never makes you feel comfortable. She makes me want to follow her over the cliff".

As McCullers, Jenny Bacon exudes a lot of long winded, Southern inflected yearnings an frustrations about her loneliness and unspent passion, 'though the play leaves one wondering why, and if, no one ever returned these feelings. In a play which glosses over relationships, Reeve and Carson's is the most carefully depicted. Nevertheless it is not clear what would motivate the unloved man, casually abandoned by his wife's pursuit of la vie boheme, to continue through Carson's life as caretaker after her many strokes and
then, suddenly, end his own

McCuller's alleged destructivity to those around her is not evident within this play, except for the sudden suicide of her long suffering husband which, as presented, seemed more a surprise than a shock, with little buildup or reflection. There is only evidence of this extremely self centered young woman's reputation for destructivity towards herself, but her constant smoking and drinking was unremarkable for its time and not the ultimate cause of her death (rather a series of strokes which ultimately killed her in 1967 at the age of 50).

The play is peopled with cursory appearances of celebrities who influenced her life. There is friendly banter with Tennessee Williams (Lee Hopper) about stealing each other's lines, advice from Ethel Waters (Rosalyn Coleman) and Richard Wright (Leland Gantt). Carson is devastated when Gypsy Rose Lee (Anne Torsiglieri), on whom she had a huge unrequited crush, announces her impending marraige, which inspires the character of Frankie, the 12 year old tomboy in "Member of the Wedding", who loves the bride of her brother. But these opportunities for fascinating revelations remain inexplicably unexplored.

According to a posted article in the lobby, the play is dedicated to investigating Ms. McCullers' creative process. But that quest is only evidenced in fragmentary phrases such as "I write little moments..... tidbits .....that tease the true meaning out of my story".

Instead of vital drama we have long passages, as within a novel, about our heroine's wistful longing for love (she was a lesbian before it could even be uttered and her many unrequited crushes on women were a source of levity among her friends). McCullers was passionate about life but had little passion in her life.

The people who inhabit McCullers' plays were societal and/or physical misfits and the poignancy with which she portrayed these characters are what made her books so affecting. Famous for depicting "a certain kind of loneliness" she decried, "old at 35, I'm not alone in my despair....", sad because "I have reached an age and never been in love ...I have been a coward and never let another person into my heart as I entered theirs". She muses that the definition of "member" in her book is "a fake promise that someday someone
will love you".

On the plus side, Ms. Schulman's play does whet the appetite to learn more about Carson McCullers and read her books: Member of the Wedding, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye, Clock Without Hands, Ballad of Sad Cafe. That is, one supposes, the purpose of the play.

The Women's Project Theatre, 424 West 55th Street, 212 239-6200