Denise Clarke stars as American poet Anne Sexton in Sylvia Plath Must Not Die. (Trudie Lee/One Yellow Rabbit)

For a poet who killed herself at the age of 45, Anne Sexton was a real live wire. Call her the party girl of 1960s American poetry – she loved to drink, smoke, laugh, flirt. A tall, striking brunette who once worked as a fashion model, she appears well-dressed, vivacious and seductive in photos and film clips, like a less inhibited Jackie Kennedy.

“She really was a fun human being,” says Denise Clarke, who portrays Sexton in Sylvia Plath Must Not Die, a new play by Calgary’s One Yellow Rabbit theatre company. “Reading about her, I was struck by how men and women just loved her. She was a lively, engaged companion. And she was a rock star in the poetry scene. Her readings could draw a thousand people.”

Fellow poet Sylvia Plath was among those pulled into Sexton’s orbit. The Rabbit show, opening Dec. 2 at Toronto’s Young Centre for the Performing Arts, begins with an account of how the two women became friends while attending Robert Lowell’s poetry workshops in Boston in 1959. After class, Sexton and Plath would jump into Sexton’s car and drive down to the Ritz bar, where they’d get cheerfully sloshed on martinis and swap stories about their suicide attempts.

“What we live and breathe for is the actual meat and potatoes: what the artist has done, their output. We’d rather focus on that, instead of crawl through their biographies. ... Right there, in their poems, you get the whole human story.”

—Denise Clarke

That spirit of morbid conviviality runs through Sylvia Plath Must Not Die, which uses their writings to trace their troubled lives and reveal the shared themes of their work. Both wrestled with bouts of crippling depression and capped an ongoing obsession with death by finally offing themselves. Plath stuck her head in a gas oven in 1963 at the age of 30, 11 years before Sexton succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning in her garage.

Paradoxically, their brief lives burned brightly.

“Strangely, there’s a lot of laughter in this show,” Clarke says over the telephone from Calgary, where the play premiered last winter as part of the Rabbits' 25th anniversary season. “These were funny women. We’re not interested so much in how they died as in how they lived. And people who are that willing to examine death do tend to be pretty alive when they’re alive.”

Director Blake Brooker puts Sexton and Plath [played by Onalea Gilbertson] at centre stage, where they confide in us through their poetry [and, in Plath’s case, some journal entries, too]. Clarke’s gregarious Sexton links the poems by musing about her kinship with Plath, whom she envied for committing suicide first and “stealing” her death. Meanwhile, the women’s widowed husbands, a bemused Alfred [Kayo] Sexton [Andy Curtis] and the brooding British poet Ted Hughes [Michael Green], provide commentary from the sidelines.

In between the show’s spoken passages, all four characters engage in dance-like interludes, set to a jazzy score by composer Richard McDowell, that give kinetic expression to their relationships. It’s the same poetry-in-motion technique the Rabbits used for their 1990s hit Doing Leonard Cohen, a work they’re reviving at the Young Centre to alternate with Sylvia Plath. The movement in both shows was staged by Clarke, who is also a dancer-choreographer and author of the Rabbits' distinctive physical style.

Sylvia Plath Must Not Die stars, left to right, Andy Curtis, Denise Clarke, Onalea Gilbertson and Michael Green. (Trudie Lee/One Yellow Rabbit)

Sexton would have appreciated this hybrid approach. She liked to set her recitals to music and occasionally fronted a jazz-rock group called Anne Sexton and Her Kind.

“Sexton thought of herself as a monologist and performer,” Clarke says. “You really can feel that when you’re stepping out to tell one of her poems.”

Clarke says she and Gilbertson have avoided imitating Sexton's and Plath’s Bostonian accents and their overly dramatic reading style, which was popular half a century ago but sounds stilted today. “We thought that could get very pretentious after a while,” Clarke says.

However, she did watch film footage of Sexton for the body language. “I studied the way she used her eyes. She was forever seducing – she just didn’t know how to operate except through sex and desire. I think that, coupled with her incredible self-knowledge in her poetry, gave me my performance clues.

“And I also was very influenced by the idea that she almost always read tanked on a quart of vodka,” Clarke adds, laughing. “Oh my God, that blew my mind. You’ve got to be really in good training to do that.”

Indeed, Sexton was an alcoholic on top of everything else. But until the booze destroyed her talent, she wrote prolifically, publishing a dozen books prior to her death and winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1967. Poetry was her means of staying sane. Unlike Plath, an academic overachiever who was always bent on a literary career, Sexton was a suburban mother with only a high school diploma; she first turned to writing as therapy after a postpartum breakdown.

Her candid confessional poetry, while not as finely wrought as Plath’s, was perhaps more socially significant. Writing uninhibitedly about marriage, motherhood and sexuality, Sexton was, in the words of her biographer, Diane Wood Middlebrook, “one of the first American poets whose bold art made feminist issues accessible to middle-class white women.”

The Rabbits capture the kind of patriarchal attitudes the two poets were up against in the years before the women’s movement took hold. In one scene, Curtis’s Kayo Sexton — a salesman who could have stepped out of the '60s-set TV series Mad Men — airs his exasperation with his wife: “Poetry is not a sink full of dishes, an unironed shirt, or a baby’s unchanged diaper.”

Clarke, who was a child in the '60s, wonders if Sexton’s feminist voice isn’t just as resonant now.

“Mad Men is an excellent example of how shocking it was back then,” she says. “But some days I think nothing’s changed. It’s still not just normal for women to do anything.”

Michael Green, left, and Denise Clarke pay homage to a Canadian poetry icon in One Yellow Rabbit's Doing Leonard Cohen. (Jason Stang/One Yellow Rabbit)

She points to this year’s U.S. presidential election and Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful battle with Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination. “I think [Clinton being a woman] was a bigger issue in the end than the racial issue.”

By pairing this play with Doing Leonard Cohen, the Rabbits have created a kind of 1960s poetry-fest. The Cohen show, which the troupe first presented in 1997, draws heavily on the Canadian bard’s literary output in the '60s.

It includes a wide sampling of his poems, as well as a wildly hilarious adaptation of Beautiful Losers, the 1966 experimental novel that Cohen wrote in a burst of amphetamine-fuelled creativity on the Greek island of Hydra.

These two plays, along with 2003’s Dream Machine – a cabaret musical based on the works of Beat icons William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin – make up what Clarke calls the Rabbits’ “typewriter trilogy.” They reflect the company’s passion for literature, and for letting writers speak for themselves. The shows are the opposite of the typical biopic treatment, which concerns itself more with the artist than the art.

“What we live and breathe for is the actual meat and potatoes: what the artist has done, their output,” Clarke says. “We’d rather focus on that, instead of crawl through their biographies. It’s all in the poems, anyway. They are all – Plath, Sexton and Cohen, too – brutally honest about themselves. Right there, in their poems, you get the whole human story.”

Sylvia Plath Must Not Die and Doing Leonard Cohen run at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto from Dec. 2 to 13.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.