MERCY STREET is Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton's only play and incorporates many of the themes that infuse her poetry, the deeply personal, the nature of madness, and the subjectivity of truth.
Anne Sexton, a fine poet with an astounding knack for incorporating the ugly and immediate vocabulary of the pressing workaday world into lyrics that nevertheless remain lyrics, is the author of MERCY STREET .
The play is constructed quite literally to resemble the Offertory in Anglican or Roman Catholic mass .
Miss Sexton's initial use of ritual is striking .
The exploration, in rotating flashbacks, produces some riveting line-images .
-Walter Kerr, The New York Times .
This is Miss Sexton's first play.
She is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, and the tone of her poems has always been laceratingly personal.
In some she seemed like a latter-day, neurotic Emily Dickinson.
The poems have a voice of their own, and a way with imagery.
MERCY STREET is the story of a woman searching her way home from the valley of madness .
Miss Sexton has written a play to be considered rather than dismissed .
-Clive Barnes, The New York Times.
