STAGE REVIEW : Baytown ‘Belle’ Full of Warmth and Insight

Baytown Theatre Company producers Tom Strelow and Peter Cutrona love theater. For their debut production they couldn’t have chosen a better property to show their devotion than William Luce’s one-woman tribute to poet Emily Dickinson, “The Belle of Amherst.”

Dickinson also had a passionate love: her lifelong worship of words. Through discouragement and loneliness, she kept on writing her mystical, musical verse, experimenting with the shape of poetry and the deep individuality of words, particularly those you “can take your hat off to.”

This production, which was originally seen at Costa Mesa’s Backstage Theatre, has charms that excuse its bare-bones look. Though the uncredited set is barely more than a few pieces of furniture and a few props, actress Rebecca May and her director, Peter Taylor, furnish the stage with the personality and colorful spirit of the woman some Amherst residents referred to as Squire Dickinson’s half-cracked daughter.

Dickinson is sometimes thought of as a strange, repressed spinster. She was neither, and May makes sure we don’t forget that. Her Emily is full of fun, just as ready to tweak the noses of her uncomprehending neighbors as she is the noses of her sister Lavinia and her brother Austin. Eccentric? No, Emily was not eccentric, though she wasn’t above giving that impression.

“Emily, stop your posing,” Austin begged her. Whatever did Austin mean, Dickinson seems to say to herself with a private smile.

May is a robust Emily, like a good dinner roll: warm to the touch, solid, but once you get inside, rich in flavor and soft as a zephyr on the summer air. She gives you her recipe for her favorite “black cake.” She dusts as she chats up her visitors with memories that she usually keeps to herself, hidden away like her poems in their large wooden box.

Taylor has staged May to provide a good bit of visual interest that makes the tiny stage seem much larger than it is, just as May makes more of the daily moments in Emily’s life than Emily probably did herself. If May’s delivery could use more variation in vocal tone, the actress makes up for it with her insights into Dickinson’s world.

‘The Belle of Amherst’

* A Baytown Theatre Company production of the William Luce play. Produced by Thomas Strelow and Peter Cutrona, in association with Baytown Art Center. Directed by Peter Taylor. With Rebecca May. Lighting: Pamela Paulson. Sound: Deanna Wildt. At the Baytown Art Center, 10621 Bloomfield, No. 8, Los Alamitos. Plays Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. $15. (310) 431-9611, Ext. 11. Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes.