STAGE REVIEW : JENS IN A MAGNIFICENT REPRISE OF ‘ABOUT ANNE’

When as much has been glowingly written about a performance and a work as has been noted of Salome Jens in “ . . . about Anne,” the natural and perverse human tendency, when one returns to it later, is to pick at it, to say that everyone initially was caught up in the blush of its newness and that it doesn’t hold up under the indifferent scrutiny of time.

” . . . about Anne” is a compilation of the works of the poet Anne Sexton. Jens was affecting when she did it as a part of a program called “Transformations” at the Los Angeles Actors’ Theater in 1980, she was even more successful with a couple of runs in 1983 here and later in New York, and she’s magnificent now in her reprise at Stages in Hollywood.

To the extent that the fine actor represents the word made flesh, no poet could dream of a better embodiment of language brought into physical expression than what Jens’ interpretation brings out here. It is exuberant, shaded, passionate, tender, lyrical and clear.

By now Jens has come so close to Sexton that we’re reminded of how poetry and theater emanate from the same root--the word, delivered before a rapt audience. One is reminded here too of how the poet isn’t a fancy or esoteric tinkerer with language, but that the true poet’s language is a complete sensual and imaginative response delivered in a transparent vessel cobbled with words.

The morbid and self-pitying are easy traps to fall into while playing Sexton, but none of that is underscored here. There’s sorrow, surely, and despair (Sexton mentions “the little white dish of my faith breaking in a crater”), but Sexton’s language was her sixth and most vital sense (imagine the sensibility of a woman who could look at her husband’s sleeping back and see “each shoulder as the most well-built house”), and it’s that vividness that Jens plays.

This isn’t a star turn, either. Jens is a big woman, and of a certain age now. But, dressed in a white hospital-looking gown, her quickness of expression makes her look smaller, and her face has the freshness of someone who’s just awakened from a pleasurably deep sleep. The rapturousness Jens exudes doesn’t seem the least bit affected or “theatrical” (meaning dishonest). There’s plenty of smart technique here, but it’s hidden. We feel the exuberance of a supple, resonant performer who has been given the words to scour herself out with and cut loose. This is theater.

J. Kent Inasy did the fine light design, Charles Albertine composed the somewhat Muzak-y music.

Performances Thursdays and Fridays at 8 p.m., Sundays, 2:30 p.m., at 1540 N. McCadden Place, Hollywood, (213) 465-1010, through June 6.