V. R. Lang, Poems and Plays

Random House, $10.00

From 1950 until her premature death in 1956, Bunny Lang shepherded the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which produced verse plays by Richard Wilbur, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, James Merrill,

W. S. Merwin, Lyon Phelps, Archibald MacLeish, Mary Manning, and most especially Bunny herself. The Theatre also engaged the passing devotion of scenarists such as Edward Gorey and David Omar White, amateur actors of all kinds, including this reviewer, and stagehands as illustrious as the poet John Wieners. The plays were usually performed in borrowed halls, but in its heyday the Theatre boasted a professional director, Edward Dodge Thornmen, and its own upstairs “auditorium,” accommodating forty-nine spectators and a sink, just off Harvard Square, with dressing rooms and a toilet in an antiques shop next door.

Two of V. R. Lang’s plays make up half this book; also included are fortyeight of her lyrics. Though her work has always seemed to me, well, uneven, it did strike her own note, attempted things worth trying, and set a tone for others, those members of the New York School who wrote better than Bunny Lang, or lived longer. The memoir was first published privately, soon after Bunny’s death. It’s a gem, the finest piece of Alison Lurie’s prose I have read. (The knee-jerk irony which sometimes enervates her novels is entirely under control here.) Her portrait of Bunny Lang, perhaps because it overflowed spontaneously from powerful feelings, is gaudy, funny, perplexing. Lurie’s Bunny is as opulent a personality, and as disappointing an artist, as V. R. Lang was in life.