SOURCE: "A Festering Rage," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 10, 1993, p. 8.

In the following review, Urbanski writes that the subject matter of Alice in Bed is challenging and interesting but the play suffers from numerous limitations.

How do you write a play about emptiness, about a woman whose "career choice" was to be an invalid? Who retreated from life to her bed with recurrent, undefined—perhaps imaginary—illnesses? Who read a lot, had a few friends and kept a journal, but never held a job or took a lover? This is the difficult subject Susan Sontag has chosen to dramatize in Alice in Bed, her new play about Alice James, who lived from 1848 to 1892.

If known at all today, James is remembered for being the sister of the famous novelist Henry James and the renowned psychologist William James. In literary circles, she first attracted attention for the...