Alice in Bed: A Play in Eight Scenes - Tapa blanda

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 in Wonderland. A tea party is convened where Alice is counselled with Emily Dickinson and Margaret Fuller and by two exemplary angry women from the nineteenth-century stage: Myrtha, Queen of the Wilis (from Giselle), and Kundry (from Wagner's Parsifal), the guilt-ridden woman who wants to sleep.

Susan Sontag is the author of three novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit and the bestselling The Volcano Lover; a volume of stories, I, Etcetera, and several collections of essays, including the prize-winning On Photography. Her most recent books are The Way We Live Now, a story, The Volcano Lover, and a play, Alice in Bed. In 190 she received a five-year fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation. She lives in New York City.