Alice in Bed

Alice in Bed is a free dramatic fantasy based on the life of Alice James (1848-92) the brilliant sister of William and Henry James. The waters of depression closed over Alice James when she was nineteen; she tried to summon the courage to commit suicide she suffered from a variety of vague and debilitating ailments she went abroad she stayed in bed she kept a diary and she died... at age forty-three. In Susan Sontag's play Alice James merges imaginatively with the other great Alice of her period the heroine of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. A tea party is convened where Alice is counseled by Emily Dickinson and Margaret Fuller and by two exemplary angry women from the nineteenth-century stage: Myrtha the Queen of the Wilis (from Giselle) and Kundry (from Wagner's Parsifal) the guilt-ridden woman who wants to sleep. Alice in Bed is a play about the anguish and grief and rage of women about mental traveling about the triumphs and limitations of the imagination. It is a powerful and memorable addition to Susan Sontag's achievement as a writer.