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"Perky American girl Sylvia Fluellen (the amazing Cynthia Bassham), the dour, intellectual Yankee brahmin Robert Stoner (Will Marchetti), the self-styled rebel housewife Anne Bittenhand (Naomi Jacobson) and Magus are Freed’s versions of the famously mentally disturbed American poets Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton and the Welsh Ted Hughes Plath’s husband and the only survivor in the group...
...Sylvia has a more worthy opponent in her husband. Ted is a ludicrously
manly man, a Celtic blowhard who celebrates the primitive with rough-tough
poetry
and creates rituals at the slightest provocation. He’s a nasty, arrogant
fool, but he meets his match in Sylvia, played by Bassham in a pink sweater
as the Coed From Hell. Ambitious, spoiled, self-aggrandizing and mad as a convention
of hatters, Bassham’s Sylvia has a toothpaste-ad smile that after a while
only reminds you of how predatory her teeth look. The most extreme misogynistic
fantasies male writers have ever penned about American women are more than
fulfilled—scarily, witchily—in this role mercilessly written by
one woman and ferociously acted by another."