Sylvia Plath Verse Play, "Three Women"

ROBERT SHAW, the British producer and director, has rather unusual taste in vacation reading. While most of us fill our overnight bags with Stieg Larsson novels, fashionable memoirs or local guide books, Mr. Shaw found himself some years ago lazing about in his Dubrovnik hotel reading the poetry of Sylvia Plath. A Web site he’d chanced on mentioned that Plath had written a radio play in verse, “Three Women,” which the BBC had broadcast in August 1962, less than six months before her suicide. Mr. Shaw soon located the piece,a forceful meditation on pregnancy and childbearing. He read it, he said, and decided: “This is powerful. This is incendiary. I have to go with this. I have to pursue it.”