What if Sylvia Plath and Frida Kahlo Split a Blunt?

In case you have been wondering what would happen if Sylvia Plath and Frida Kahlo got together and smoked a joint, Musas, a new play that takes the stage at the New York International Fringe Festival, imagines that very encounter. Daniel Larkin of Hyperallergic writes: "Finally, both women talk about their pain — whether mental or physical — and how their art sublimates that suffering into aesthetic ecstasy." More:

Sylvia Plath once got blazed with Frida Kahlo. This is the setting of Musas, a Water People Theater production at the New York International Fringe Festival that invites us to be a fly on the wall and listen in on these women’s conversations as they smoke, eat, play, and work.

There is no historical record of this fated meeting. Truth be told, it never actually happened. Born 25 years apart, the pair never met in real life; Kahlo died when Plath was 22. But “fiction” isn’t a dirty word. Playwright Néstor Caballero wields poetic license imaginatively as these two luminaries’ worlds collide.

Frida Kahlo wryly tells Sylvia Plath at one point: “Death is your thing. You are like a Mexican.” The bite in the joke is Plath’s suicide at 30 in 1963, cutting short her career as a poet. Beleaguered by bipolar disorder — which electroshock therapy exacerbated instead of relieved — Plath’s mind could be a dark place. Nevertheless, her poems strike like lightning. Plath became the first author to win the Pulitzer Prize posthumously, in 1982. In Musas, Mónica Steuer masterfully oscillates between manic joy and crushing despair in her monologues and interactions with Frida Kahlo. [...]

Read all about it at Hyperallergic.