SOURCE: Lewis, Tess. “Wild Fancies.” Belles Lettres 9, no. 3 (spring 1994): 25-6.

In the following review, Lewis provides a negative assessment of Alice in Bed, contending that the character's words and actions are inaccurate, implausible, and laden with banalities and trite cliches.

“How wild can be the fancies of the unimaginative female!” the bedridden Alice James wrote in her diary in 1891. Unfortunately, wild, self-indulgent fancy rather than quickening imagination is the guiding spirit of Alice in Bed, Susan Sontag's play based on Henry and William James's invalid sister. Intended as a play “about women, about women's anguish and women's consciousness” and about the imagination, Alice in Bed is in fact little more than a procession of emblematic figures uttering portentous, clipped sentences at one another. Rather than bring the historical and fictional figures to life on stage, Sontag exploits them for all the sociocultural atmosphere they are worth, leaving the...