Alice in Bed

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Alice in Bed is a free dramatic fantasy based on the life of Alice James (1848-92), the brilliant sister of William and Henry James. The waters of depression closed over Alice James when she was nineteen, she tried to summon the courage to commit suicide, she suffered from a variety of vague and debilitating ailments, she went abroad, she stayed in bed, she kept a diary, and she died... at age forty-three. In Susan Sontag's play, Alice James merges imaginatively with the other great Alice of her period, the heroine of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. A tea party is convened where Alice is counseled by Emily Dickinson and Margaret Fuller and by two exemplary angry women from the nineteenth-century stage: Myrtha, the Queen of the Wilis (from Giselle), and Kundry (from Wagner's Parsifal), the guilt-ridden woman who wants to sleep. Alice in Bed is a play about the anguish and grief and rage of women, about mental traveling, about the triumphs and limitations of the imagination. It is a powerful and memorable addition to Susan Sontag's achievement as a writer.