THREE SYLVIAS, ZERO THRILLS

Beth Hyland’s world premiere at the Geffen Playhouse arrives with the kind of literary bait that makes theater people clasp their reusable water bottles in delight. Sylvia Plath’s ghost returns to her old Boston apartment. A present-day novelist moves in. The novelist unravels as her marriage curdles and her deadline circles like a debt collector. It sounds irresistible in a grant proposal. Onstage, it feels like being trapped in someone else’s graduate thesis defense, minus the cheap wine.

Marianna Gailus and Cillian O'Sullivan

The play layers 1958 Beacon Hill over contemporary creative despair. Sylvia (Marianna Gailus) and Ted Hughes (Cillian O’Sullivan) drift through the same apartment now occupied by Sally (Midori Francis) and her husband Theo (Noah Keyishian). Sally has promised to write a book about Plath and Hughes. Instead she stress eats, doom spirals, and regards her laptop as though it might explode. Living in Plath’s former home produces not inspiration but a low hum of terror. Hyland keeps Sylvia and Ted suspended between ghost, hallucination, and embodiment of Sally’s unfinished manuscript. The ambiguity could be thrilling. Instead, it plays like indecision dressed up as mystery.

Noah Keyishian and Midori Francis

O’Sullivan’s Hughes is less brooding poet and more smug departmental chair who thinks he invented metaphor. The accent wanders freely, sightseeing through Yorkshire before taking an unplanned holiday to the Irish countryside. It is bold. It is also baffling. The production employed a dialect coach, which raises questions that may never be answered. Gailus gives Plath a curated fragility, all luminous pauses and artfully angled suffering. The feral intelligence that made Plath’s writing crackle is nowhere in sight. These specters are supposed to haunt the living. They mostly rearrange the furniture.

Marianna Gailus and Cillian O'Sullivan

The scenes between Sylvia and Ted have the faintly laminated quality of a well-researched classroom scene study. The grievances are correct. The references are accurate. The dialogue sounds like it once had footnotes. Hyland clearly grasps the parallel she wants to draw between Plath’s catastrophic devotion and Sally’s supposedly modern marriage to a rising literary star. Recognizing a parallel, though, is not the same as making it hurt. The play keeps gesturing at depth, as if depth might eventually appear out of politeness.

Noah Keyishian and Midori Francis

Francis attacks Sally’s volatility without apology. She lets the character be sharp, selfish, occasionally unbearable. It is the evening’s most committed performance. It is also wearying, because the script withholds the wit and vulnerability that might make Sally’s cruelty feel tragic instead of habitual. Theo is written as so serenely supportive that he begins to resemble a wellness podcast in human form. When he finally betrays Sally by using their private life for material, the moment lands with a polite thud. I have heard louder gasps at a malfunctioning espresso machine.

Marianna Gailus, Midori Francis and Cillian O'Sullivan

Director Jo Bonney seems periodically aware that the evening needs a pulse. The lights flare red. The refrigerator becomes an ominous threshold. Someone moves as if we have briefly wandered into a horror film that misplaced its budget. Then the play retreats to conversation. The stylistic swerves suggest desperation rather than vision, like a driver tapping the brakes and the accelerator at the same time.

Theater has produced plenty of Plath projects, many of them solo portraits fueled by a single obsessive voice. Those works at least know what they are about. Sylvia Sylvia Sylvia multiplies its apparitions and dilutes its force. Three Sylvias, yes. Thrills remain in short supply.

Midori Francis

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photos by Jeff Lorch

Sylvia Sylvia Sylvia
Geffen Playhouse, 10866 Le Conte Avenue in Westwood
1 hour and 45 minutes, no intermission
Wed-Fri at 8; Sat at 3 & 8; Sun at 2 & 7 (check for variances)
ends on March 8, 2026
for tickets ($36-$139), call 310.208.5454 or visit Geffen Playhouse

for more shows, visit Theatre in LA

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