Poet on a String is a biographical play written the way a biographical play should be. Richard Vetere gives the audience is a story that is fiction built around facts, not necessarily in a proper chronological order, but dedicated to grasping and expressing the views and personalities of the subjects. If there is a flaw it is not in the execution, but in the subjects. Vetere’s subjects Delmore Schwartz, James Agee , and Gertrude Buckman are all respected and celebrated talents in literary circles, but largely forgotten by the general public. The play is esoteric. It will be enjoyed by many, but only fully understood by an audience of literary elites.

Vetere sees two geniuses, Delamore Schwartz and James Agee, and one extremely talented and strong woman, Gertrude Buckman and shows them with all their warts and weaknesses while always admiring their talent. Buckman, in many ways the third wheel of the trio, serves as the narrator, seeing through and exposing the two celebrated authors and orchestrating her escape from them. She is the only one with few enough vices to have enjoyed a long life.

Vetere takes the most license with Agee’s life chronology. He relies on Agee’s Pulitzer Prize winning, autobiographical A Death in the Family which was only published in 1957 (two years after Agee’s death) to divine Agee’s personality and make his fame the equal of Schwartz’s at the time of the 1939 Frenchtown, NJ weekend meeting of Agee, Schwartz and Buckman where and when the play is set. He uses Agee’s time writing for Life to show Schwartz’s ADHD and delusions. That job did not start until the late 1940s. None of this use of literary license takes away from the impact or “reality” of Poet on a String.

The theme of Poet on a String is the battle between loyalty to the art (Schwartz) and making sure that the art has an audience (Agee). Neither approach served to subdue either writer’s inner demons Only Buckman who appears to have the fewest demons, was able to establish a “normal” life, albeit one frustrated by never becoming a celebrated author.

Vetere sympathies are obviously with Schwartz. He admires the dedication to art over expedience, but he recognizes that a lot of that dedication stemmed from the mental illness that helped kill him while still young and unable to ever match his early success. He is wistful that there wasn’t more of a legacy from Schwartz since he regards his raw talent as being on the same level of his celebrated contemporaries, T.S. Eliot and Ezar Pound.

Poet on a String is exceptionally well directed by Amber Brooks and Jake Minter’s lighting design is the finest I have ever seen in the Sargent Theater at ATA. Sam Cruz (Schwartz) and Joseph Monseur (Agee) contain the tension and conflict between their worlds throughout most of the play, but are most effective when their demons consume them and their world views come into direct conflict when they face off in a drunken rage.

Poet on a String is not for everyone but is really solid theater and for a limited, literary audience it is an important work asking questions that all artists must answer for themselves.