A touch of the poet: as she portrays famed lesbian poet Elizabeth Bishop onstage, Amy Irving reflects on freedom, sexuality, and the beauty of knowing oneself.

As an actor and a woman, Amy Irving has long outgrown her beginnings as that nice girl who avoided the psychokinetic bloodshed in Carrie and who nabbed an Oscar nomination for marrying a cross-dressing Barbra Streisand in Yentl.

Irving, 52, brings all her earthly experience to bear in A Safe Harbor for Elizabeth Bishop, appearing through April 30 at New York's Primary Stages. Irving gives a passionate performance as Bishop, the Pulitzer Prize-winning lesbian poet who first published in the '40s and lived until 1979. Wealthy, complex, and well-traveled, Bishop chose not to write directly about her sexuality. Instead, she expressed the frisson of lesbian identity through themes of self-division and outsiderness.

When it came to her own lesbian life, however, the Vassar-educated Bishop lived it to the fullest. Irving portrays the poet as consumed by love and totally dependent on her lover, Lota de Macedo Soares, a brilliant Rio de Janeiro architect with whom Bishop lived in Brazil for 16 of her most productive literary years.

Irving identifies with Bishop partly because she has lived Bishop's experience--as nearly as a contemporary heterosexual woman can. Irving found her own strength and self-acceptance during her 16-year relationship with the Brazilian filmmaker Bruno Barreto. "Brazillans are much freer than we are," she says. "My ex-husband used to say that he wanted to tear down the 'white picket fence' around my life. And I feel that indeed a lot has been torn down. I am much more in touch with my own sexuality. Being there in a foreign culture, I was able to see my own self-consciousness and insecurities, which come from ling in this puritanical country."

For Irving, playing Bishop is an opportunity to give back to the culture that nurtured them both. "[Elizabeth and I] both fell in love with the culture and the people and got so much from that country. She won the Pulitzer while she was there for the poems she wrote then," Irving says. "Lota and Brazil gave Elizabeth the strength to accept who she was. It's because she felt she was in a cocoon that she was finally able to write about herself and her painful childhood."

Irving is confident that American audiences will relate to Bishop's story as well. "I know what it's like to love a woman," Irving tells The Advocate, "because every time I do this play, I love this woman. But I also think everybody can relate to the isolation, the feeling that they don't fit in, that they're not a part of the larger picture."

Goldberg writes for the New York Daily News.