Shortly before she died in 1979, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Elizabeth Bishop received an honorary degree from Dalhousie University. Bishop was born in Massachusetts, but was raised by her grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia. She lived most of her life in the U.S., though 14 of her most prolific years were spent in Brazil where she lived with her companion, Lota Soares.

This is the background information that playwright Donna E. Smyth provides as a biographic and photographic prelude to Running to Paradise, a one-act play that begins and ends on the eve Bishop is to accept her honorary degree. Smyth imagines Bishop feeling trapped by her childhood surroundings that night and thinking obsessively about the past. She’s a wreck – answering to the voices of her mentally ill mother and her Bible-reading grandfather, dipping into the bottle, and sucking on cigarettes between puffs on a ventilator. While Bishop’s mind seems sharp, she’s so insecure that the emotionally distressed loner in her wins out every time.

The character does deliver some arrogantly glib remarks – “It’s always astonishing to students that poets read poetry,” she says while trying to come up with a topic for the convocation speech she is to deliver, a telling line that describes a woman who clearly understands her notoriety and, as a poet, the obscurity of that fame. But for most of the play she is so tangled up in her own self-love and loathing that Running to Paradise shapes Bishop into the ubiquitous poet cliché. The author has Bishop jumping onto furniture to deliver impassioned soliloquies, and offers up Bishop’s rambling thoughts as proof of her creative mind. The 24-page prelude Smyth provides is essential to understand the meaning behind the names and places that get dropped into the dialogue. Surprisingly, with the exception of Bishop’s description of clipping the coarse hairs off the head of a baby elephant, there are few poetic moments. Running to Paradise is saved by its brevity, but that also makes it difficult for Smyth to give her character any real depth.