EDGE

At the DR Theatre, 103 E. 15th St. Through Sept. 20. Telecharge, (212) 239-6200.

TAKE an unstable, paranoid woman who was also a striking confessional poet. Remove the poet and what do you get?

“Edge,” Paul Alexander’s take on Sylvia Plath (“The Bell Jar”), who committed suicide in London in 1963.

This one-woman play presents Plath – boiling with bile, bitterness and bitchiness – on the last day of her 30-year-old life. She’s played with savage, giggling, unbalanced nastiness by Angelica Torn in a performance at least more honest – though finally no more endurable – than the play.

As Alexander has it, the first monster in Plath’s life was her father, a strict German-American scientist, beekeeper and perfectionist who died when Sylvia was 8. In one carefully contextualized poem, the real Plath called him a Nazi – here, the accusation’s hurled in plain prose.

At any rate, Daddy’s death apparently broke something in Sylvia, who tried suicide in college and fell under the guidance of what she portrays as cold and cruel psychiatrists.

Enter the English poet Ted Hughes, to whom Plath was wed for seven years and by whom she has been betrayed. After discovering his affair with a woman named Assia (whom Plath repeatedly dubs “the whore”), Plath kills herself by sticking her head in the oven.

But the play doesn’t end there. In a clumsy device, Plath is allowed to glimpse the future. She sees (and cackles over) Assia’s suicide sometime later. She sees Hughes’ future poetical career as mediocre. (This is arguable, like Plath’s exaggerated estimate of her own achievement.) Why not have her tell us who’ll win the pennant in 2003?

So it goes, this catalog of psychotic anger, for two endless irritating hours. “Edge” is a disservice not just to Hughes (recently dead) but to Plath herself and the two children they left behind.