STAGE REVIEW : Dandelion Brandy Spikes This Lovely Cup of Tea

SAN DIEGO —  The strength of “A Lovely Light,” Marion Ross’ one-woman show on the life of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, is its seeming fragility.

The show has the gentleness of a delicate cup of steaming tea, savored in a sturdy Victorian house while a violent storm rages in the garden outside. We sense the presence of the storm through the windows rather than experience its fury.

And this cup of tea is spiked with dandelion brandy, just as Millay’s romantic verse is leavened with civilized wit.

Written by Dorothy Stickney and composed of poems, letters and narration, the play is quiet and refined. But it demands the audience’s attention.

In her performance, Ross, who is best known for her 11 years as Marion Cunningham on the ABC sitcom “Happy Days,” suggests the strong emotional currents hinted at beneath the swells of Millay’s poetry.

Millay (1892-1950) set the poetry world on its ear shortly after graduating from Vassar College in 1917, winning the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1923. Her poems rejoiced in life, whether the subject was love won or lost or fresh vegetables or apple trees.

The letters she penned to her mother, editors, friends, lovers and sisters suggest a droll, sophisticated wit and brilliant mind that harnessed and directed her surging feelings.

Eyes alert and sparkling with rambunctiousness, Ross portrays Millay as a sassy imp living inside a respectable New England woman. Then the eyes brim as we listen to the ache of heartbreak in her Greenwich Village days. Later, the vitality drains from her face after the death of Millay’s wealthy Dutch-born husband, Eugen Jan Boissevan.

Dressed in a proper, though not prim, long blue dress, Ross plays the character on a small scale that works just fine in the intimate Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre, where the show runs through Sunday.

The play has a good deal of indirect references: hints that support claims that Millay was bisexual, and a metaphorical poem from the days of her advocating that the United States end its isolationist policy and enter World War II.

At times, Norman Cohen’s staging gets as busy as a tennis match, with Ross crossing swiftly from a leather chair to a desk to a raised platform and back to the chair. But that’s a quibble in a production recommended for anyone who relishes the thrill of romantic, sensuous poetry.

‘A LOVELY LIGHT’

A dramatization in two acts of the poems and letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay. By Dorothy Stickney. Directed by Norman Cohen. With Marion Ross. Performances through Sunday at the Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre, 444 4th Ave., San Diego.