Mixed Media
TELEVISION t’s early January, just after the finish of a long holiday break, and Alena Smith ’02 has two weeks to wrap filming on the second season of Dickinson, her AppleTV+ period dramedy about the 19th-century lyric poet, which films in upstate New York. “Everyone is disoriented,” she says of the actors trying to transition from vacation back into their waistcoats and pin-tucked lawn gowns. Period costuming aside, Dickinson is no period piece. In the first season, Emily Dickinson, played by True Grit star Hailee Steinfeld, throws raging house parties when her parents are out of town, makes out with her brother’s fiance, and protests the obligations of women’s domestic lives. “You’re not a cat,” her mother says, scolding Dickinson for dropping a dead mouse in the lap of a suitor. “No,” Smith’s Dickinson replies. “Tragically, I am a woman.” “I think that this is a coming-of-age story about a radical young female artist who was ahead of her time,” says Smith, who began working on her
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The cast of Dickinson, the offbeat period dramedy created by Alena Smith for Apple TV+.
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Haverford Magazine
show about the famously reclusive poet seven years ago. “She has this legacy that we’re still unpacking, that has a lot to say to a contemporary audience.” Rather than tell that story in the repressed vocabulary of Victorian Amherst, Mass., Smith translated it into the diction of today. Which means that when her characters dance, choreographed minuets devolve into twerking. When “Death” stops by to visit Dickinson, he’s played by rapper Wiz Khalifa in a top hat. Smith, who studied playwriting at the Yale School of Drama, credits her knack for building such audaciously compelling worlds to the work she did not long after leaving Haverford, when she set up an experimental theater company called Dead Genius Productions with fellow grads Alison D’Amato ’02 and Christian DuComb ’01. “We did little shows in the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. We did a lot of gathering of interesting source material and then creating very crazy worlds out of it. And I think that that style of working definitely helped me create Dickinson, because it’s kind of like research meets imagination.”
