THEATER : Emily Dickinson Production Stanzas on Its Own : Although ‘The Belle of Amherst’ was written for another actress, Rebecca May brings her own special touch to the role in this offering by Backstage Theatre.

The back-fence gossips can’t figure her out. She dresses in white year after year, regardless of the season, and never leaves her father’s house. Sometimes, just to catch a glimpse of her, the neighbors come to the door bearing gifts, but she disappears to the second floor to avoid them.

She is no timid recluse, though. As William Luce writes in the preface to “The Belle of Amherst,” his one-woman play about the life of 19th-Century poet Emily Dickinson, “she consciously elected to be what she was--a voluntary exile from village provincialism, an original New England romantic, concisely witty, heterodox in faith, alone but not lonely.”

Certainly she had a wicked sense of humor about the curiosity she aroused.

“One old lady came to the door the other day to get a peek inside,” Dickinson recalls early in the first act of the Backstage Theatre’s lovely production. “I surprised her by answering the door myself. She stammered something about looking for a house to buy. To spare the expense of moving, I directed her to the cemetery.”

Rebecca May, who plays the title role, not only captures Dickinson’s childlike glee with her bright eyes and the vivid animation of her face but she also conveys the plain-spoken sensitivity of Dickinson’s poems, so richly quoted throughout the play, with the quiet passion they require. You know you’re in good hands, moreover, when an actress can make you believe in the presence of the invisible characters to whom she sometimes speaks. May’s skill at suggesting them is sublime.

In one particularly funny scene, rendered with perfect timing, Dickinson sits on a settee with sister Lavinia and caters to her taste for local news.

“Vinnie and I read the Springfield Republican every night,” Dickinson begins. “I read the news aloud while she sews. Vinnie has an odd liking for those stories of accidents where trains meet each other unexpectedly, or gentlemen in factories get their heads cut off quite informally.” The scene builds on that and becomes indelible.

Luce wrote “The Belle of Amherst” for Julie Harris, the actress with whom it is most closely associated. In 1977, Harris won her fifth Tony Award for her performance of the Dickinson role on Broadway. Ten years later she reprised “Belle” at the Moulton Theatre in Laguna Beach at a benefit performance for the Laguna Playhouse.

Harris is a small, thin woman with a certain reserve; May is plump and has an incandescent sweetness. Not having seen Harris in the role, I won’t attempt any comparisons of their interpretations. Besides, the middle-aged Dickinson’s “letter to the world” is offered at the Backstage with a touching urgency that stands on its own. May’s performance has a radiance, rare for an amateur actress, not unlike the “phosphorescence, that light within,” which Dickinson speaks of as the essence of poetry.

Of Dickinson’s more than 1,700 poems, only seven were published in her lifetime--and those anonymously. She yearned for literary fame. But her obtuse mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Atlantic Monthly editor whose name has rightly been forgotten except by Dickinson scholars, convinced her that her poems were too unorthodox to publish. He thought her meters “spasmodic,” her material “uncontrolled,” her rhymes improper.

Dickinson objected, but she accepted her “barefoot rank” in the literary world. The disappointment made her ill, nevertheless, expressed in the following lines: “A great Hope fell / You heard no noise / The Ruin was within / Oh cunning wreck that told no tale / And let no Witness in. . . .”

Still, the tenor of the play is scarcely tragic. As if to underscore that, the playwright takes the edge off our sense of injustice. The editor’s literary myopia is turned into a joke when Dickinson informs us that another poet refused to take his advice.

“He didn’t give up as I did,” she says, holding up a volume of poetry that has gone through many editions. “Mr. Higginson says his poems are absolutely scandalous! His name? (Pause.) Walt Whitman!”

Peter Taylor’s direction is a model of subtlety and coherence, although the second act does have a tendency to drag. But that is less a problem of the performance than of the script.

Meanwhile, the Backstage has outdone itself with attractive production values: period furniture, flowered wallpaper, a trompe l’oeil mural to suggest another room in the poet’s home and atmospheric lighting. Also, there is the black cake made from Dickinson’s own recipe, which the audience gets to share during the intermission.

For a 34-seat storefront theater on a tiny budget, this is one helluva production. Bravo.

‘The Belle of Amherst’

A Backstage Theatre presentation of a William Luce play. Produced by Al Valletta. Directed by Peter Taylor. With Rebecca May. Production design by Taylor, May and Jeffrey Ault. Lighting technician: Pam Paulson. Costume design by May and Leslie Miller. Performances Friday-Sunday at 8 p.m. through Sept. 28 at the Backstage Theatre, 1599 B-2 Superior St., Costa Mesa. Tickets: $12.50. (714) 646-0333.