When a writer is known for her “enormous power of reticence,” a quality that Octavio Paz hailed in Elizabeth Bishop, giving that writer a one-woman show is perhaps not the first thing that springs to mind. Yet that’s what Marta Goes has done, complete with drunken soliloquies and orange feather boas, in her dutiful but draggy “A Safe Harbor for Elizabeth Bishop.”

The play’s title refers to Ms. Goes’s homeland of Brazil, where the exquisitely lucid poet (played by a game Amy Irving) spent the better part of 15 years with her longtime partner, the unstable architect Lota de Macedo Soares. With the exception of a very brief coda, the entire play is devoted to those years, and Ms. Goes’s focus extends beyond selecting that 15-year window. Bishop’s much-anthologized “Questions of Travel” contrasts Brazil with her childhood home of Nova Scotia, for example, but we hear only the former portion of the poem.

“Safe Harbor” begins in 1952 as Bishop, a poet in her mid-40s with only one book to her name, arrives in the port of Santos. Ms. Goes resists the typical biodrama convention of tossing famous names left and right. It’s not until a third of the way into “A Safe Harbor” that Bishop refers to “my friend Marianne Moore.”This is appropriate: Bishop hardly enjoyed the sort of European-outpost scene that some of her fellow expats did in, say, Paris or Venice. Despite her occasional ambivalence toward the Brazilian countryside (“There are too many waterfalls here, the crowded streams / Hurry too rapidly down to the sea”), Ms. Goes’s Bishop clearly doesn’t pine for the company of Moore, Robert Lowell, and the rest.

Nor does “A Safe Harbor” use this inward focus to address Bishop’s work too deeply. Only seven of her poems are used here, and these are often just fragments. Ms. Goes and director Richard Jay-Alexander, who cram three dozen different scenes into the play’s 90 minutes, make the switch from Bishop-the-narrator to Bishopthe-poet painstakingly clear.The lights dim, and a buttery spotlight is trained on the head of Ms. Irving, who instantly drops her voice half an octave and becomes. Much. More. Precise. With. Her. Diction.

Frankly, the difference between the two is plenty clear without the stagecraft. Despite the fact that Bishop was one of the most accessible poets of her generation, the disparity between her verse and her conversational monologues is jarring. Take this example:

They turn together
in their sleep,
close as two pages
in a book
that read each other
in the dark.

Here are the sentences that come immediately before that poem: “I’m no longer in control of my heart. I’ve never felt so loved, so much pleasure. Lota, I want to get into the tub with you.” Suddenly that power of reticence hailed by Paz (and bemoaned by Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich, among others) doesn’t seem so enormous.

Ms. Irving – whose dewy eyes have taken on a welcome glint since her Hollywood heyday in the mid-1980s – gives a crisp, engaging take on Bishop. Her honeyed alto is well-suited to reciting verse, and with the exception of a ludicrous drunk scene near the end, she comfortably negotiates the highs and lows of Bishop’s relationship with Lota. Ms. Irving does particularly well recounting the observational touches so cherished by poets, as when she renders Ms. Goes’s lovely image of the town’s maids all standing on balconies listening to the 1962 World Cup soccer tournament on their radios.

The physical production is less impressive. Except for a hammock off to the side and a handful of projections culled from Bishop’s actual papers, the visuals come courtesy of an overworked turntable that spits out set designer Jeff Cowie’s vast array of furniture. This glut of desks, easels, ladders, and beds quickly clutters the stage, and Mr. Jay-Alexander lets the pacing flag during nearly every one of the multitude of scene changes. “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” begins Bishop’s most famous poem, used here as a sort of valediction. It’s an art that “A Safe Harbor for Elizabeth Bishop” would do well to cultivate.

Until April 30 (59 E. 59th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues, 212-279-4200).