Emily Dickinson on receiving end in ‘Prairie Home Companion'

By Nick Grabbe
Staff Writer

Published on April 18, 2008

Poet Emily Dickinson, Amherst's most famous 19th century resident, was the subject of some 21st-century ribbing on National Public Radio Saturday night.

Garrison Keillor, playing the character Guy Noir in a skit on "Prairie Home Companion," auditions for a role in a New York musical called "Stop for Death," based on Dickinson and her poetry. It's an allusion to Dickinson's poem "Because I Could Not Stop for Death."

Keillor even gets in a dig at Amherst.

It isn't the first time Keillor has made fun of Dickinson. A previous skit on "Prairie Home Companion" had a teenage Emily hiking in the rain in Great Barrington with writers Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Keillor has also claimed, tongue in cheek, that Dickinson was a Lutheran, as evidenced by her poem, "Success is counted Swedish by those who ne'er succeed."

And then there's the segment on one of Keillor's anthology CDs called "Emily Dickinson's Birthday Pizza."

In Saturday's skit, Guy Noir's New York job is to stand in line for other people. He's standing in for an actress waiting to try out for a role in a new musical, but she doesn't come back before the audition begins.

"Stop for Death" fleshes out Dickinson's poem into a four-act musical complete with a romance with writer Henry David Thoreau. Guy Noir finds himself auditioning for the role of Dickinson herself, and the producers are intrigued by the prospect of gender-blind casting.

"She was one of those writers that transcended gender," says the producer, noting that actress Cate Blanchett played Bob Dylan in the movie "I'm Not There."

Another actress auditioning for the role sings a song that includes the line, "I stay home every night, I go around dressed in white, I write poems secretly and tonight I will get out of Amherst." She asks for someone to bring her horse so she can meet Thoreau at Walden Pond.

"I think it's time for the masculine side of Emily Dickinson to be recognized," the producer says to Noir.

At the end of the skit, the opening of the musical has been delayed and moved from New York to New Mexico