Writing of local theater company ShadowApe’s recent performance, Transformations (“A Lighter ShadowApe,” A&E, July 23-30) — an original stage adaptation of Anne Sexton’s poetic rewriting of selected Grimm’s fairy tales — NUVO’s theater critic Lisa Gauthier used the following qualifiers: too benign, traditional, just wasn’t dark enough, annoying, wasn’t up to par. Gauthier’s review, however, is rife with misunderstanding.

Transformations was written three years before the author’s suicide. It is a record of her battle with the dark and the light, wherein we recognize the author’s pull to the dark side, to its death-dealing destructiveness, as well as to its possible promise of rebirth. The battle with the demons impels every one of her tales; yet it is not the demons who are to hold center stage, but the dialogue with them. To have made the play based on this text merely “dark” would have missed the center of Sexton’s authorship. Her confessional writings find a protected space where otherwise despair raged. Hence the simplicity of ShadowApe’s stage: We are not to loose ourselves in its aesthetics but rather draw the action inside our own skins and recognize what demons seek response from us.

Sexton’s point of view cannot be encapsulated by any epithet. Gauthier relies on the populist label of Sexton as feminist and suggests ShadowApe’s play misses that target. Certainly a feminist voice, Sexton also explored beyond mere negation of the old world: not because she was tempted to repeat patriarchal stupidities, rather because as an artist she recognized that genuine creation doesn’t merely blow off the past, it reshapes it. Sexton probed these traditional stories, presenting each one with a twist — to see how past images wish to transform toward a possible myth of the future. For example, Sexton’s “Rapunzel” sympathizes with the witch who loses her soulmate long held captive in the tower. It is the same story but told with a total reevaluation of feeling. Whereas the old version merely leaves the witch with her just deserts, Sexton widens her lens and finds in old endings new beginnings: This little unredeemed witch business, what do we do about her? How has she been dismissed for millennia by traditional endings but now presses to find her place? To my feeling that kind of questioning is Sexton’s genius, and it is the sentiment conveyed by ShadowApe’s nuanced performance in their creatively precise adaptation of her book.  

Sexton is a mythmaker, not an entertainer. That is where she poured her heart, the heart ShadowApe richly lays bare for us. Sadly it is just that heart and its reasons the critic will easily miss.