three women

Sylvia Plath's poem was originally performed as a radio play. It's now going to be done as a theatrical play.

Unfortunately, it's only going to have a five-week run. I'd have definitely gone to see it in October if it was still showing.

"Three Women" was written in the last year of her life, as were the Ariel poems, which were the first pieces I read by her when I was a teenager. I remember my 9th grade English teacher taking me aside and telling me she was "worried" about me when she saw me with my copy of Ariel. Plath's double tragedy is that not only did she commit suicide, which also cut short her amazing writing career, but her writing and her suicide became forever entwined. I wasn't reading Ariel because she killed herself, I was reading it because it was stunning writing and made me appreciate poetry and word choice and word rhythm far more than I had previously.

You can brush it off and say her double tragedy was her own fault, but get inside the mind of someone struggling with depression before you do so. Read her journals, for instance (the unabridged/unedited version). She wrestled with it for a good decade before her suicide. She had psychotherapy and even electroshock therapy. This is not the history of someone who let depression take over without a fight. And considering that her husband had more or less left her for another woman and had gotten the other woman pregnant, and Plath was caring for their two children by herself, if she hadn't been depressed by that, she would have been inhuman. And if she was good at anything, it was being fully human and writing about it, however painful.