By Cynthia Citron
NORTH HOLLYWOOD, California–“Anne Sexton saved my life,” Salome Jens says. The actress, still beautiful in her 70s, sits munching her salad in a trendy outdoor cafe. Her words are startling as they float in the bright California sunshine. “At 46,” she continues, “I was suicidal and alcoholic. Just like Anne. But I quit drinking the day she committed suicide, and I’ve been dry for 30 years.”
Now, in tribute to the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Jens is bringing her award-winning one-woman show …about ANNE back to L.A. for just two performances, on November 19th and 20th. The play, which she began performing in 1985, reprises Sexton’s life in her own words. “She was known as a confessional poet,” Jens explains, “and her whole life was expressed in her poetry.”
Sexton’s poems begin with her childhood and chronicle the dramatic events in her life: her marriage, her children, her obsessions, her quest for God, her bouts of madness, and her fascination with death. “In this play Anne speaks,” Jens says. “She speaks through me, but every word in the play is hers.
“It’s amazing how alive she was,” Jens continues. “Her love of life was so immense!” Then, at 30, suffering from post-partum depression, Sexton was advised by her therapist to begin to write. “She wrote with a lot of humor,” Jens notes, “and she often read her poetry accompanied by the music of a live rock band.”
Sexton, who lived her entire life in the Boston area, was friendly with Sylvia Plath, that other Pulitzer Prize-winning poet from Massachusetts, to whose work Sexton’s is most often compared. The two, and poet Maxine Kumin, made a talented triumvirate studying creative writing with poet Robert Lowell at Boston University. According to Sexton, she and Plath often talked intimately about death and their early attempts at suicide. Plath’s in 1963 preceded Sexton’s by 11 years.
“Alcoholism is the disease of our time,” Jens notes. “That and drugs. Anne was using both of them and nobody ever told her to stop taking all that crap. Instead, they kept prescribing more pills.” Jens likens Sexton’s experience to her own bout with alcoholism. “After 42 your body is no longer able to metabolize those things,” she says, noting that her first husband, actor Ralph Meeker, “drank himself to death.” Her divorce from her second husband, early radio talk show host Lee Leonard, was so traumatic that it exacerbated her own drinking problem and prompted her to seek help.
Now bright and healthy, Jens continues with her acting career. Probably best known for her ongoing role as The Founder, a shape-shifter in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine television series, she also appeared in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Falcon Crest, and Melrose Place. But her major roles were on the Broadway stage: A Far Country, After the Fall, and Mary Stuart, (the latter two as an original member of Elia Kazan’s company at Lincoln Center), to name just a few, as well as in The Winter’s Tale, Macbeth, and Anthony and Cleopatra for Joe Papp’s Public Theatre. In Los Angeles she most recently won the LA Drama Critics Circle Award and the Backstage West Garland Award for her role in Leipzig.
She is fond of doing the plays of Donald Freed, who, she says, “doesn’t talk and think the way we talk and think. He speaks in a language I don’t speak.” Laughing, she remembers having to learn 46 pages of dialogue for his play How Shall We Be Saved?
Having acquired an MFA in Theater Arts from UCLA, she has been for many years “an actress who teaches” at her alma mater. “Young people are not trained properly any more. They are told ‘Don’t act because it will be too dramatic,’” she says. “And so they don’t project or enunciate. A whole art is being lost.”
She also serves as moderator for a group of her peers—actors and writers who get together formally to work on their plays. Her favorite actors, she confesses, are Russell Crowe (“he’s exciting and unpredictable”) and Christopher Plummer (“an actor’s actor, they don’t get any better”). But she saves her highest praise for actor Mitch Ryan, with whom she appeared in The Winter’s Tale, A Moon for the Misbegotten, and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. “We create magic together,” she says. “It’s a love relationship without the distraction of a love affair.”
Finally, returning to the discussion of her role in …about ANNE, she observes, “Living through the events of Anne’s life, they spoke to me. What she saw and wrote—that’s ageless. From my point of view,” she concludes, “artists are forever young.”
…about ANNE, presented by The Group Rep, Fri. Nov. 19 & Sat. Nov. 20; 8pm. Tickets $25; at door $30. Lonny Chapman Theatre, 10900 Burbank Blvd., North Hollywood; 818.700.4878.
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Citron is Los Angeles bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World