I and you dramaturgy packet

I and You

Dramaturgy Actor Packet A supplement to Olney’s virtual exploration of the play: www.olneyiandyou.wordpress.com

Compiled by Maegan Clearwood Dramaturgy Apprentice, Olney Theatre Center 2014

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ............................................................................................. 3 Part I: About the Play

The Playwright ...................................................................................... 4 Q&A ...................................................................................................... 5 First production .................................................................................... 6 Part II: Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass Biography…………………………….……………………………………….…….………………8 Leaves of Grass…………………………….…………………………………………………….9 Criticism…………………………….…………………………….………………..……….…….10 Responses to Leaves of Grass……….………………..……….…………….………….12 Part III: The World of the Play Chronic Illness…………………………….…………………………….……………………..15 The Millennial Generation………………….………………………….………………..16 Part IV: Sounds of the Play Jerry Lee Lewis……………….…………………………….……………………………………18 “Great Balls of Fire” ……….…………………………….……………………………………19 John Coltrane ...................................................................................... 19 A Love Supreme…………………………………………………………………………………20 Part V: Bibliography, Additional Reading ................................................ 22

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INTRODUCTION A Message from Your Dramaturg Greetings from the Olney Theatre Center Education Office! As dramaturg for this production, I am your resource for any and everything you need to know going into this exiting artistic process. A dramaturg’s responsibilities vary depending on each production and director’s needs, but the following is a broad definition of the role, courtesy of the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas: “Dramaturgs contextualize the world of a play; establish connections among the text, actors, and audience; offer opportunities for playwrights; generate projects and programs; and create conversations about plays in their communities….They work with their other artistic collaborators to hone their vision, focus their goals and find outlets for their creative work on new and classical plays and dance pieces. [They] serve the field as experts on our dramatic past and as advocates for writers of today and the important work of the future.”

Along with determining how to best contextualize this story and introduce the audience into its world, I am an advocate for the artists throughout the rehearsal process. I aim to facilitate conversation among the performers and production team and challenge them with the ever-­‐important question, “Why this play now?” Hopefully, this packet will be the start of this dialogue. It is not meant to overwhelm you with facts; rather, it should inspire you to look at the musical through a fresh, nuanced lens. I intend to continue the conversations sparked from this packet throughout the rehearsal process, through an image and idea board in the Actors Hall, as well as individual discussions and notes.

If you have any questions throughout this process—about the world the play, the musical itself, or a particular word or phrase you find in the text—please do not hesitate to contact me. I will try to make myself as available as possible throughout rehearsals, but if you need to reach me, my email address is education@olneytheatre.org. Feel free to stop by the Education Office in Crawford during the weekday to see me in person. I also encourage you to follow my dramaturgical blog, which will be made available to interested audience members as well. Any comments or suggestions for further exploration are welcome. You can find the blog at olneyiandyou.wordpress.com.

– Maegan Clearwood OTC Dramaturgy Associate 240-­‐529-­‐7855

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PART I: ABOUT THE PLAY The Playwright From LaurenGunderson.com: Lauren is a playwright, screenwriter and short story author from Atlanta, GA. She received her BA in English/Creative Writing at Emory University, and her MFA in Dramatic Writing at NYU Tisch, where she was also a Reynolds Fellow in Social Entrepreneurship. Along with the rolling world premiered of I and You, Bauer, commissioned by San Francisco Playhouse, will premiere there and in NYC at 59E59 in 2014. Her play Silent Sky (Jane Chambers Award finalist) premiered at South Coast Rep in 2011 and was further developed and rewritten for TheatreWorks, which opened to raves calling it “sheer magic”. Her 2011 3-­‐city rolling world premiere of Exit, Pursued By A Bear, was featured in American Theatre Magazine and The Week, and has reached 20 communities across the US winning “Best Comedy” accolades. Bear is now published by Playscripts, as is her comedy, Toil And Trouble, after premiering in Berkeley to raves.

Her first musical, The Amazing Adventures of Dr. Wonderful and Her Dog! commissioned

by The Kennedy Center, opened last fall to rave reviews and continues its life in a state-­‐ wide tour in Florida this summer. Dr. Wonderful is becoming a series of children’s books published by Amazon. Emilie: La Marquise Du Chatelet Defends Her Tonight (published

by Samuel French) was commissioned and premiered at South Coast Rep in 2009, and has run across the country and in England. By And By premiered at Shotgun Players in Berkeley. Fire Work was developed at The O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, and is a 2011 winner for Aurora Theatre’s Global Age Project, and will premiere at Theatre First in 2014. She has developed plays with Second Stage, Red Bull, and Primary Stages in NYC; New Rep in Boston; Playwrights Foundation, Crowded Fire, TheatreWorks, Aurora Theatre, and The Magic Theatre in San Francisco; Kitchen Dog Theatre in Dallas; Synchronicity, Actor Express and Horizon Theatre in Atlanta; JAW at Portland Center Stage in Portland; WORDBridge, Brave New Works, and others.

Her work has received national praise and awards including the Berrilla Kerr Award for American Theatre, Global Age Project, Young Playwright’s Award, Eric Bentley New Play Award and Essential Theatre Prize. She has been commissioned by South Coast Rep (3 times), Crowded Fire, The Alliance Theatre’s Collision Project, Marin Theatre Company, Actors Express Theatre, Dad’s Garage Theatre, Theatrical Outfit, City University of New York and Synchronicity Performance Group. Leap was published with Theatre Emory’s Playwriting Center (2004), and her first collection of plays, Deepen The Mystery: Science and the South Onstage, is published with iUniverse (2006). She has developed plays with Second Stage and Primary Stages in NYC, New Rep in Boston, Playwrights Foundation, Crowded Fire, Aurora Theatre, and The Magic Theatre in San Francisco, Kitchen Dog Theatre in Dallas, Actor Express and Horizon Theatre in Atlanta, JAW/West in Portland, WORDBridge, Brave New Works, and others. She received a Sloan Science Script Award (2008) for her screenplay Grand Unification. Leap was published with Theatre Emory’s Playwriting Center (2004), and her short story, “The Ascending Life,” won the Norembega Short Fiction Award and was published in the anthology, The Shape of

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Content; her science play Background was published in ISOTOPE: A Journal of Nature and Science Writing. Her string theory poem “Hook of a Number” was published in the anthology Riffing On Strings.

She has spoken nationally and internationally on the intersection of science and theatre and Arts Activism, and teaches playwriting in San Francisco. She is a Playwright in Resident at The Playwrights Foundation, a Dramatists Guild member, and was a member of Just Theatre’s New Play Lab. She writes for The Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal, tweets @LalaTellsAStory, and curates HowToPlaywright.com.

Q&A with the Playwright From Marin Theatre’s production page on I and You, this interview was conducted by Margot Melcon, dramaturg: Lauren Gunderson is having a busy year. By the time summer 2014 arrives, she will have had five different plays premiere at five different theater companies around the Bay Area, all within a 12 month stretch. After working steadily since earning her MFA in playwriting from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and moving to San Francisco four years ago, this prolific playwright is hitting her stride. The variety being showcased in the current productions of her plays reveals the dynamic range of styles and subjects she confidently weaves into her stories...Gunderson’s play I and You shares qualities with her other work – witty, sharply drawn characters; previously unheard ideas on smart, NPR-­‐worthy topics; enormous humanity and emotional heart – but in some ways is a departure. It follows the story of two teenagers, strangers at the beginning of the play, who ultimately find a deep connection as they learn about each other and themselves while digging deep into the meaning buried in Walt Whitman’s extraordinary poem “Song of Myself.” …On the first day of rehearsal, Gunderson took a moment to look back at how this play and these characters took shape, and what she drew on from her own journey of discovery to bring the story to life.

Q: Why do you think it’s so hard to write young people accurately?

A: I think because they change so quickly and because – and I’m not the first genius to think of this – social connectedness and media make people update all the time. But the essence of what it means to be young remains the same – you’re not an adult yet, but you know enough to survive. You are tasked only with protecting yourself, with making smart decisions, and learning and exploring and being curious.

There is something compelling to me about the curiosity and that verve and the fickleness of that era in your life, and what that allows you to think and do and try and be surprised by. At that age, I remember and certainly tried to capture in this play, that sense of hope, the yearning for what’s next.

Q: How is it writing a younger character dealing with the incredibly adult problem of being sick?

A: The only way to write it without the play becoming a play-­‐about-­‐a-­‐sick-­‐girl is to write

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a girl who is defiant, who stares her illness down and says “you’re not gonna win.”

That’s a person I want to watch. Even though there is some general angst, there’s nothing complacent about her, or about this situation. She understands her disease, she even undermines it, and there’s a fascinating power in that.

Q: What about Whitman’s “Song of Myself” inspired you to pull that particular poem into the fabric of this play?

A: One: the poem has this sense of unity through democracy. Whitman says that we are all one because we are all equal, even though it might not look like it at times. There is a universal oneness.

Two: that rebellious spirit. Whitman paints a picture of a crazy American stomping through the world and yelling out his yawp because the world is so beautiful, or falling in love, or being so mad at war, or as Caroline is doing as she defies death, or whatever’s going on. It’s not a sit-­‐back poem, it’s a lean-­‐in poem, it’s a yawp poem.

And then third, it is the very literal wrestling with death. As a kid, I remember being fascinated with dying, not in a morbid way, but in a “oh, that happens and we don’t know what happens after that, and where does the self go, and it happens to literally everyone” kind of way. In some ways, it was scary, but reading Whitman and Darwin and poets and thinkers and scientists calmed me down – that kind of agreement we make with dying to make our lives matter. So: oneness, yawp, death. And out of all three: life.

Q: What do you remember about yourself from when you were Caroline and Anthony’s age?

A: I’m sure that a lot of people have an image – or two or ten – of themselves when they’re 16. That image is very present with me all the time. When I zoom back to me at 16, it’s always in my room, it’s always on my bed, it’s always at midnight, moonlight streaming in the window that was right over my bed, with a book or – you know, this is before phones did anything besides make a call, or whatever. I remember this kind of secret space that was disconnected from everything else, which was just mine, and something really mysterious and beautiful and empowering about that space, as isolated and as kind of out of time as it was. I thought that would be an interesting thing to capture in a play: isolated, out of time, but everything you are and hope to be.not all that different from the author’s own.

Production History A National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere, I and You was first staged at Marin Theatre in Mill Valley, California, October 10-­‐November 3. It was directed

by Sarah Rasmussen and featured Jessica Lynn Carroll (Bellwether) and Devion McArthur.

“Director Sarah Rasmussen's staging is entertaining but slow-­‐moving for such a short play with such energetic characters. Will McCandless' sound design is laced with bubblegum teen-­‐pop and the recurring beep of a dying smoke alarm. Maggie

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Whittaker's costumes are nicely casual and suburban-­‐looking (we have no idea where this play takes place), and Michael Locher's set is a remarkably detailed teenage girl's bedroom, the walls cluttered with torn-­‐out magazine pages, collages and photo-­‐book strips.” — Sam Hurwitt for MarinJ. “A charming, thought-­‐provoking surprise… with a joyous embrace of what it’s like to be young, MTC’s I and You is a sweet and lovely thing, a tiny little play that, miraculously, contains multitudes. — North Bay Bohemian

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PART II: WHITMAN AND LEAVES OF GRASS Walt Whitman Walter Whitman (1819-­‐92) was born in Long Island, NY. He worked as an essayist, poet, and journalist, and volunteered as a nurse in the American Civil War (1861-­‐65). He remains one of the most influential American poets, and is often referred to as the “father of free verse.” “Song of Myself” is a poem included in Whitman’s collection Leaves of Grass, and was the first and longest poem in the original version. The work as a whole was an attempt to reach the common person through an American epic, venerating the body as well as the soul, and finding beauty and reassurance even in death.

Whitman was the second of nine children and his family endured great economic hardship during his childhood. His formal education ended at age 11 so he could supplement the family income, but his five years working in a printer’s shop exposed him to literature, including Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and the Bible. Whitman spent his young adulthood working mainly as a teacher and journalist, founding two newspapers (including a “free soil” paper in Brooklyn, opposing the expansion of slavery into the western territories). He decided to become a poet shortly before 1850.

He self-­‐published Leaves of Grass in its first edition as 12 untitled poems in 1855 and spent the rest of his life revising it, adding almost two hundred poems to the original 12.

Leaves of Grass opens with a preface in which Whitman proclaims the greatness of the American nation— saying “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem”—and declares his intention to write an epic for all Americans: “A great poem is for ages and ages in common, and for all degrees and complexions, and all departments and sects, and for a woman as much as a man, and a man as much as a woman.”

Whitman’s cadence in Leaves of Grass is based on the Bible, but he infuses the poems with the common rhythms of American speech and includes slang and informal expressions, calling it “the dialect of common sense.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson called Whitman’s collection “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.” However, the poems were also controversial because the language was perceived as obscene and excessively sexual.

Whitman left NY for Washington, D.C. in 1862. There he found work in low-­‐level government jobs, leaving time for him to volunteer as a nurse for wounded Civil War soldiers—the purpose of his relocation. When Whitman was fired from his job in 1865, possibly on moral grounds if his supervisor had read Leaves of Grass, a newspaper editor friend of his published an exaggerated biographical pamphlet, “The Good Gray Poet,” defending Whitman as a wholesome patriot. The pamphlet increased his popularity, as did the publication of his “O Captain! My Captain!,” a poem on the death of Abraham Lincoln that was relatively conventional and was the only poem of his to appear in anthologies during Whitman’s lifetime.

Despite Whitman’s mixed critical reception during his life, his lifestyle and work have become the inspiration for many artists who followed, including anti-­‐war poets,

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composers, and Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in the 1950s and 1960s. 20th century literary critic Harold Bloom once wrote, “If you are American, then Walt Whitman is your imaginative father and mother, even if, like myself, you have never composed a line of verse.”

“Song of Myself” Excerpted from the introduction to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” A Sourcebook and Critical Edition, by Ezra Greenspan.

“Song of Myself” is the most acclaimed and influential poem written by an American. As Walt Whitman has been called “America's ur-­‐poet,” one may call “Song of Myself” an American “ur-­‐poem.” It has been extensively discussed, studied, imitated, parodied, translated, and incorporated into other art forms for 150 years by writers, artists, composers, film makers, and general readers across national and linguistic boundaries.

Its author was, in 1855, as unlikely a candidate as Herman Melville or Emily Dickinson for canonical authorship. When Ralph Waldo Emerson, arguably the most prestigious American writer of his time, received an unsolicited review copy of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, in which “Song of Myself” first appeared, he was so unsure about the identity of the author that he sent his letter of appreciation to the Manhattan office of the book's distributor (no commercial publisher would stake its budget or reputation on the self-­‐ published work). Emerson also expressed an opinion that has proven prophetic: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start. …“Song of Myself” was positioned in the 1855 Leaves of Grass after the just-­‐composed prose manifesto as the volume's untitled lead poem, its 44-­‐page length greater than that of the other 11 poems combined. The poem challenged poetic decorum even at eye level. Formal punctuation marks were kept to a minimum, individual verses were frequently so long that they ran on to the next line, stanzas varied wildly in length from several lines to several pages, and no system of names or numbers was used to organize the poem by stanza or section. Not entirely satisfied with the poem then or later, Whitman ceaselessly revised the text, sometimes in significantly altered fashion, for inclusion in each of the subsequent five American editions of Leaves of Grass published over the remaining 37 years of his life. … Generally speaking, the first edition of Leaves of Grass was far more widely reviewed than read. Leading national magazines and a fair number of daily newspapers reviewed it in the weeks and months following publication, but its roughly 800-­‐copy first printing was more than sufficient to fill demand. Critical reception was uneven at best, and so it remained throughout the century. A small number of reviewers in 1855 praised it strongly, but even most of those who saw merit in the work typically complained about its flagrant violation of aesthetic and social decorum. Meanwhile, social conservatives denounced the book as flouting accepted norms of morality; literary critics for so undermining standards of verse that it was unrecognizable as poetry. Accolades such as Emerson's were in the minority, and praise was seldom unaccompanied by criticism. The major exception was Whitman himself, always his own strongest proponent, who

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engaged in anonymous self reviews immediately following publication and remained an unceasingly energetic, ingenious, even shameless self-­‐promoter throughout his entire career.

A worse sign for Whitman, subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass received less formal attention, at least through the 1870s, while readership remained sharply limited.

Whereas leading writers and critics of his time — Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Bayard Taylor, John Burroughs, Matthew Arnold, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Algernon Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, John Addington Symonds — were well aware, if not uniformly admiring, of Whitman's verse, the reading public was generally apathetic or hostile. In 1882 that hostility took a legal turn, when the Boston district attorney threatened action against both the book (specifying numerous passages of “Song of Myself,” as well as of other poems) and Whitman's publisher for violating the state's obscenity statutes. When his intimidated publisher, James Osgood, demanded compliance and Whitman refused, Osgood withdrew and passed the sheets and stereotype plates on to Whitman, who at first sold bound copies from his home in Camden, New Jersey, then made an arrangement with publishers across the Delaware River in Philadelphia for its distribution. Even at his life's end, Whitman's reputation more nearly approximated that of a poet's poet than that of the poet of the people, as he had represented himself in the 1855 frontispiece.

But if he did not have reputable fame, he had notoriety, which with changing standards of morality, aesthetics, and politics gradually became indistinguishable from fame. He remained optimistic to the end of his life about posterity's judgment, and he was soon proven correct. Newspaper coverage of Whitman was commonplace during his last decade, and by the time of his death he was a widely known, if hardly uniformly respected, poet in the United States and Great Britain…Changing mores and aesthetics in fin de siècle America produced a cultural atmosphere far more accepting of Whitman's poetry. By the 1920s, the growth of his reputation as a “standard” American writer paralleled the inchoate institutionalization of American literature as a body of letters and a field of study.

Criticism “One of the greatest ‘I’ poets of all time, Whitman’s ‘I’ is not the ‘I’ of the introspective versifiers who write always and only about themselves. Rather it is the cosmic ‘I’ of all people who seek freedom, decency, and dignity, friendship, and equality between individuals and races all over the world. In this atomic age of ours, when the ceaseless rings are multiplied a million fold, the Whitman spiral is outward toward a freer, better life for all, not narrowing downward toward death and destruction. Singing the greatness of the individual, Whitman also sings the greatness of unity, cooperation, and understanding. Certainly, his poems contain us all. The reader cannot help but see his own better self therein.”

– Langston Hughes, The Ceaseless Rings of Walt Whitman “The argument that ‘Song of Myself’ makes – that we have more in common than

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separates us, that the common thing is the nature that courses through us, that we and the nature of which we are a part are carried by a profoundly sexual rhythm – ‘Urge and urge and urge,’ he would write, ‘always the procreant urge of the world’ – that the principle of nature is abundance and variety, that death is as much a part of its rhythm as birth and sexual desire are, that love – which he calls the ‘kelson of creation’ – and sympathy – ‘I am attesting sympathy,’ he writes – ‘Shall I make my list of things in the house and skip the house that supports them?’ – are among the deepest ways that the human imagination connects people to one another and to that larger rhythm, that the body is as important as the soul, that the teeming life of Manhattan and its working people and the immensity and diversity of the American continent embody this nature, and that it is a great leveler and hence a democratic power, and it is a power bound to supersede all previous notions of divinity, and that all this is as common as the grass – this argument is made in the ideas of the poem, in its dazzling and superabundant lists, and in its seriousness and humor and tenderness and moments of melodrama and flashes of tragedy, but also in the sheer range of its language. …This poem about democracy and imagination, and what to make of life and death, and about a person’s own wondering experience of his own existence makes its case for our common human imagination by deploying the abundance, variety and hilarity of the languages in which human beings have both described and invented the world in which they find themselves living.”

– From Robert Hass’s introduction to Song of Myself and Other Poems by Walt Whitman, 2010.

“Like most poetic works of genius, ‘Song of Myself’ has defied attempts to provide a definitive interpretation. In a very real sense, no reading of the poem has clarified the sum of its many mysteries. Critics have provided useful readings, concentrating on one or another dimension of the poem: Carl F. Strauch on the solidity of a fundamental structure, Randall Jarrell on the brilliance of individual lines, James E. Miller, Jr., on the portrayal of an ‘inverted mystical experience,’ Richard Chase on the often-­‐overlooked comic aspects, Malcolm Cowley on the affinities with the inspired prophecies of antiquity, Robert K. Martin on the resemblance to a ‘dream vision based on sexual [essentially homosexual] experience…In the final analysis, readers must find their own way through Song of Myself. They will know that they are on the right path when they begin to feel something of the ‘great power’ that Ralph Waldo Emerson felt in 1855 (Whitman 1326).”

– James E. Miller, 1998 “Placing himself (Whitman the poetic self structured in and by language, not Whitman the ‘real’ man in 1855) at the core of the poem designates anything not assimilated by the poet superfluous… The poet can now express himself in all his corporeality – not a world external to himself or a tradition not originating in himself. The reader need look no further for referential meaning than the all-­‐encompassing poet whose egocentric, imperative commands and entreaties alert the reader to his authority and testify to his nearness. Since the poem’s content centers around the poetic self, which exists only in

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and as the poem, ‘Song of Myself’ achieves a self-­‐referential closure without, however, becoming objectified. As opposed to the static, spatial form normally associated with closed, ‘auto-­‐telic’ poems, Whitman’s poem is dynamic and personal, temporal and aural, with a unique local subject as its ground.

– Mark Bauerlein, 1986 He permitted love. That was the primary thing I noticed. The degree and quantity and variety of love in Whitman are simply astonishing. At thirteen I did not yet know the word eroticism, much less auto-­‐eroticism, but I could tell when I encountered it, how much each manifestation was delicately, systematically supporting all the others, like the network of filiations Whitman would later describe as spinning from the poet-­‐ spider's essence. Affection for one's own body, ‘that lot of me and all so luscious,’ ‘no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones,’ underwrote the will to incorporate material phenomena— ‘All this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine’— the love of the world, the spectacle of other people, but also the love of what Whitman named the soul.

-­‐ Alicia Ostriker, “Loving Walt Whitman and the Problem of America,” 1992 Responses to “Leaves of Grass” Countless artists have been inspired by Whitman’s seminal work, and allusions to the poems in Leaves of Grass can be found in any number of literary and artistic works. The following are some notable responses: “Counter-­‐Jumps: A Poemttina After Walt Whitman,” published as a parody in 1860 I am the Counter-­‐jumper; weak and effeminate.

I love to loaf and lie about dry-­‐goods.

I loaf and invite the Buyer.

I am the essence of retail. The sum and result of small profit and quick returns. …For I am the shop, and the counter, and the till, But particularly the last.

And I explore and rummage the till, and am at home in it.

And I am the shelves on which lie the damaged goods; The damaged goods themselves I am.

And I ask what’s the damage?

I am the crate, and the hamper, and the yard-­‐wand, and the box of silks fresh from France.

And when I came into the world I paid duty.

And I never did my duty, And I never intend to do it,

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For I am the creature of weak depravities; I am the Counter-­‐jumper; I sound my feeble yelp over the roofs of the world.

“A Supermarket in California,” Allen Ginsberg, 1955 What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-­‐conscious looking at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!— and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective. We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?

(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)

Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-­‐teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

“A Pact,” Ezra Pound, 1915 I have made a pact with you, Walt Whitman— I have detested you long enough.

I come to you as a grown child Who has had a pig-­‐headed father; I am old enough now to make friends.

It was you that broke the new wood,

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Now is a time for carving.

We have one sap and one root— Let there be commerce between us.

“I, Too,” Langston Hughes, 1924 I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong.

Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table When company comes.

Nobody’ll dare Say to me, “Eat in the kitchen,” Then.

Besides, They’ll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

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PART III: THE WORLD OF THE PLAY Chronic Illness The following passage is excerpted from prayersforrachel.com, a blog by Rachel Stratton, a 17-­‐year-­‐old girl who was diagnosed with brain-­‐stem cancer in 2012.

According to a 2013 article about Rachel’s blog, the idea started after the diagnoses: “Mortality became very real for the Stratton family; and with that reality came a list of questions. Her family had questions, her friends had questions, her neighbors had questions; in fact, just about everyone who knew Rachel had questions.

But the toughest question to answer, Rachel said, was: ‘How are you doing?’ "It's just hard for me to explain over and over and over again," she said. "This is not my whole life.

This is just something that happened to me."

People meant well, and Rachel knew that, but talking about cancer in every single conversation was emotionally killing her. That's when the idea hit her to tell everyone what's going on in one single shot: she started a blog. ‘Emotionally, I have never dealt with anything this hard in my life,’ she said.”

Her blog is clearly from the point of view of a teenager: she has her likes (running track, playing piano, obsessing over Celine Dion) but she’s also confused, frustrated, often bitter and angry. As one follower of the blog commented: "Even when she's not positive, she's just real. She's just being real and honest.”

Published on her blog on Jan. 25, 2014: When you are diagnosed with cancer, everybody thinks that is your trial. The truth is, I still have a life and all the drama and disappointments that come along with it. I just have cancer as my cherry on top, and that really puts a delay on life sometimes. I have as many dreams and aspirations as the next person, but I also have been told that I'm not going to make it. There's a semi big frustration, on par with hitting McDonalds at 10:31 AM, one minute after breakfast closes, and being told there's nothing you can do to get your sausage McMuffin and hash brown.

This last week, all of my fingertips went numb on my left hand, and my face is still just as numb. I feel so frustrated and helpless. When I was little I always thought parents, family, bishop, and doctors could solve all of my problems. It's scary to have a problem that nobody can solve, and that not even mommy can kiss better.

Here's another annoying frustration to me (besides the fact that now I am much slower at typing, due to the numbness in my left hand). When people are insensitive. Nothing frustrates me more than a rude, careless, bull headed, insensitive and most likely insecure person.

This last week I was hanging out with my friends at a nearby place and friends had been bailing on me all day long (really not trying to sound like a drama queen, but it's definitely coming across that way). Nothing to me had seemed to be going right. (So Jr.

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High, right?). Anyways I was frustrated to the point where I left on foot and walked next door to the bowling alley where my brother and his friend happened to be. Also there, was my cousin because it was his birthday, and his friends. So I went and jumped on my cousin to be annoying and joke around like I always do. One of the people from his friend group, that I later found out was just a tag along, started a conversation with me and was being a little vicious.

I don't know exactly how it got out of control, but it did. So I told him "Hey, you can't talk to me like that!" And what was his response? "Why not?" I told him "Because you shouldn't be talking to me like that." and he said "Why not?" (Obviously this is where I pull the cancer card and say....) "Because I have cancer!"

This is where the situation gets almost disturbing, when he replies "Well you're half dead anyways cause you have cancer so it shouldn't matter to you anyways."

I'M HALF DEAD ANYWAYS? What kind of dreadfully awful individual would ever say a thing like that?

I definitely didn't sit there and take it politely, quite contrary actually. But people from my blog seem to think I'm some kind of hero, and I'd like to try and maintain that image.

He has a cancerous attitude and personality, and I felt sorry for myself, while in my bed for about the next 24 hours after that. But I realized, I should feel more sorry for him.

I'm more alive than he might ever be. Yeah I have my quirks with people, but I also know how to genuinely appreciate someone, and that's more than he's ever learned in his 30+ years of overeating and bullying. (Uncalled for I know).

Here's the moral to my story. You might not have cancer, but it's easier than you think to catch a cancerous attitude. Learn to appreciate people while you have them, and despite their troubles, trials and worries. You'll never see exactly the same as somebody else, take it from an identical twin. But you can learn to see beauty in the way that others see things, and live their lives, and that's why we're here.

I know I've been complaining a lot recently, but I'm trying to display the raw honesty behind a life with my particular trial. The only way I know how to do it is through words and stories, so here ya go! Thanks for reading, supporting, praying, and commenting. I truly do appreciate it! I can do hard things!

The Millenials “In Defense of My Generation,” a Huffington Post article by high school student Dani Bloom, July 2013.

I remember the first time someone called me a hipster. I think my hair had been side-­‐ parted into a braid, my feet propped up on the cafeteria seat next to me. I had been drinking tea and writing notes in my copy of On the Road. And yeah, because I had been taking photos of student government candidates for my school newspaper, I had a camera hanging from my neck.

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My friend had called me "hipster" jokingly, but she got me thinking about what that really meant. I thought about why the hipster movement had resurfaced, why my generation is so obsessed with reliving whatever traces of the past we can find -­‐-­‐ why we try so hard to look and dress and talk and drink like the writers and thinkers of generations past. Because when you look hard enough, you realize my generation is nostalgic for eras we can only read about.

The thing is, we need to understand the beauty of our own generation. The '60s are over, the '70s are dead and gone, and good Lord nobody's bringing the '80s back anytime soon. My generation (and yeah, I'm guilty of this too) tends to idolize the intangible. We idealize the past. We're in love with the idea of going on the road, with hipster glasses that look like they've been stolen from Ginsberg's grave and a Kerouac desire to live in the moment, but we don't want to take action. We can't. Dean Moriarity can't travel the country when he's got SATs to take and a pile of incomplete college apps saved on his desktop.

Our generation doesn't have many unifying factors. Sure, we grew up in the tech age.

We love our iPhones and we'd do pretty much anything to salvage our WiFi access. We drink a lot, statistically, but aren't big fans of the drugs that defined the '60s and '70s.

We're pretty darn future-­‐oriented: we plan for college years in advance, try to plot the right path to our golden Dream Jobs, consider the merits of various careers long before we graduate high school. We're asked, practically from the first day of kindergarten until our fateful college interviews, what we want to do when we Grow Up. And we wait and wait and wait and hope that someday we'll find ourselves awake and alive in those Grown Up shells.

But I have to believe that this generation is special, darn it. We have the power to succeed, to actually make a difference, to catalyze a positive change in a world that never stops churning. We're a dedicated bunch, loyal as heck, built on a steady dosage of SnapChats from our BFFs. We love to interact with each other. Constantly. (Maybe to a fault, but hey, what's so bad about incessantly updating each other on our lives?). We believe that our thoughts are valuable, that our ideas and opinions and what we had for breakfast are Twitter-­‐worthy. We hold on to memories. We assign significance to the simplest moments -­‐-­‐ Instagramming a sunrise, taking a Vine of a beautiful view. We take billions and billions of pictures, maybe out of habit, but also because we as a generation believe that the instants we can capture are worth attention.

Maybe past generations were like this. They had to also get frustrated and bored, although they didn't use those endless bored hours stalking Facebook walls and reading tweets from four months ago. I'm sure not everyone in the '50s was sitting back in coffee shops, scrawling some metaphor about the death of gods while fixing side-­‐swept hair. The hippies were a small minority; not everyone in the '80s discoed and boogied down. Other generations had to be as overwhelmingly shapeless as we are. Still, we need to realize that our generation has its own character, our own beat -­‐-­‐ even if we're not another Beat Generation.

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PART IV: SOUNDS OF THE PLAY Jerry Lee Lewis (1835—) Born in Ferriday, Louisiana, Lewis' first musical influences were eclectic. His parents listened to swing and Al Jolson records. But Lewis' earliest big influence was country star Jimmie Rodgers. In his teens Lewis absorbed both the softer country style of Gene Autry and the more rocking music of local black groups, along with the gospel hymns of the local Assembly of God church. He first played his aunt's piano at eight and made his public debut in 1949 at 14, sitting in with a local country and western band in a Ford dealership parking lot. When he was 15 Lewis went to a fundamentalist Bible school in Waxahachie, Texas, from which he was soon expelled. He has often agreed with his own fundamentalist critics, saying that rock & roll is the Devil's music.

In 1956 Lewis headed for Memphis. His debut single, "Crazy Arms" (previously a country hit for Ray Price), did well regionally, but it was the follow-­‐up, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On" (Number Three, 1957), that finally broke through. The song first sold 100,000 copies in the South; after Lewis' appearance on Steve Allen's TV show, it sold more than 6 million copies nationally. "Great Balls of Fire" (Number Two, 1957) sold more than 5 million copies.

Lewis' career slammed to a stop after he married his 13-­‐year-­‐old cousin, Myra Gale Brown, in December 1957. (She was his third wife; at age 16 he had wed a 17-­‐year-­‐old, and soon after that ended, he got caught in a shotgun marriage.) The marriage to Brown lasted 13 years, but at the time Lewis was condemned by the church in the U.S. and hounded by the British press on a 1958 overseas tour. His career ran dry for nearly a decade. Eventually, Lewis and his producer, Jerry Kennedy, decided to abandon rock & roll for country music. In 1968 he came back with "Another Place, Another Time" (Number Four country); it was the first of many Top Ten country hits.

Lewis' personal life has been marked by tragedy and controversy. In 1962 his son Steve Allen drowned at age three. Another son, Jerry Lee Lewis Jr., was killed in an automobile accident in 1973. (Lewis' brother had died when hit by a car when Jerry was two.) In September 1976 Lewis accidentally shot his bassist in the chest. In 1982 his estranged fourth wife, Jaren Gunn Lewis, drowned in a pool under mysterious circumstances shortly before their divorce settlement. His fifth wife, Shawn Stephens Lewis, was found dead in their home 77 days after their wedding. Although investigative pieces on that incident, including one in Rolling Stone, exposed discrepancies in Lewis' and various law-­‐ enforcement officials' accounts and flaws in the investigation, no charges were ever brought against Lewis. Jerry Lee Lewis remarried again, taking his sixth wife. She later gave birth to Jerry Lee Lewis III, Lewis' only surviving son.

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“Great Balls of Fire” Jerry Lee Lewis almost passed on recording his career-­‐defining single because he found it blasphemous. Many in his church would come to agree with him.

One fall afternoon, Lewis took to a piano at the legendary Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee, and pounded out "Great Balls of Fire" in just a handful of takes. However, this took some coercion from Sun owner Sam Phillips; Lewis, a devout Christian and bible-­‐school dropout, worried that the song’s title was too sinful. In fact, the track, written by Otis Blackwell and Jack Hammer, took its name from a common Southern expression that was considered improper by many Christians – the same prim audience that would come to decry Lewis and rock music after the song’s release, calling both the work of the devil.

Lewis’s swaggering vocals and electrifying piano theatrics carried "Great Balls of Fire" to the top of the Billboard charts and to the forefront of the 1950s American rock & roll renaissance. It is widely regarded as one of the most influential songs in rock history, and is Number 96 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

John Coltrane John Coltrane was, after Charlie Parker, the most revolutionary and widely imitated saxophonist in jazz. Coltrane grew up in High Point, North Carolina, where he learned to play E-­‐flat alto horn, clarinet, and (at about the age of 15) alto saxophone. After moving to Philadelphia he enrolled at the Ornstein School of Music and the Granoff Studios; service in a navy band in Hawaii (1945-­‐46) interrupted these studies. He played alto saxophone in the bands led by Joe Webb and King Kolax, then changed to the tenor to work with Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson (1947-­‐48). He performed on either instrument as circumstances demanded while in groups led by Jimmy Heath, Howard McGhee, Dizzy Gillespie (with whom he made his first recording in 1949), Earl Bostic, and lesser-­‐known rhythm-­‐and-­‐blues musicians, but by the time of his membership in Johnny Hodges's septet (1953-­‐54) he was firmly committed to the tenor instrument. He performed infrequently for about a year, then leaped to fame in Miles Davis' quintet with Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones (1955-­‐57).

Throughout the 1950s addiction to drugs and then alcoholism disrupted his career.

Shortly after leaving Davis, however, he overcame these problems; his album A Love Supreme celebrated this victory and the profound religious experience associated with it. Coltrane next played in Thelonious Monk's quartet (July-­‐December 1957), but owing to contractual conflicts took part in only one early recording session of this legendary group. He rejoined Davis and worked in various quintets and sextets with Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Chambers, Jones, and others (1958-­‐60). While with Davis he discovered the soprano saxophone, purchasing his own instrument in February 1960.

Having led numerous studio sessions, established a reputation as a composer, and emerged as the leading tenor saxophonist in jazz, Coltrane was now prepared to form his own group; it made its debut at New York's Jazz Gallery in early May 1960. After briefly trying Steve Kuhn, Pete La Roca, and Billy Higgins, Coltrane hired two musicians

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who became longstanding members of his quartet, McCoy Tyner (1960-­‐65) and Elvin Jones (1960-­‐66); the third, Jimmy Garrison, joined in 1961. With these sidemen the quartet soon acquired an international following.

Coltrane turned to increasingly radical musical styles in the mid-­‐1960s. These controversial experiments attracted large audiences, and by 1965 he was surprisingly affluent. In his final years and after his death, Coltrane acquired an almost saintly reputation among listeners and fellow musicians for his energetic and selfless support of young avant-­‐garde performers, his passionate religious convictions, his peaceful demeanor, and his obsessive striving for a musical ideal. He died at the age of 40 of a liver ailment.

“A Love Supreme” John Coltrane recorded “A Love Supreme” in December of 1964 and released it the following year. He presented it as a spiritual declaration that his musical devotion was now intertwined with his faith in God. In many ways, the album mirrors Coltrane's spiritual quest that grew out of his personal troubles, including a long struggle with drug and alcohol addiction.

From the opening gong and tenor saxophone flutter, a four-­‐note bass line builds under the sound. This simple riff becomes the musical framework for the rich improvisations that comprise John Coltrane's 33-­‐minute musical journey. …Lewis Porter heads the masters program in jazz history and research at Rutgers University-­‐Newark. He's the author of John Coltrane: His Life and Music. Porter says that simple idea culminating in the first movement with an unprecedented verbal chant by Coltrane forms the foundation of the entire suite. It's a theme Coltrane consciously uses in subtle and careful ways throughout A Love Supreme. For example, toward the end of part one, "Acknowledgement," Coltrane plays the riff in every key.

"Coltrane's more or less finished his improvisation, and he just starts playing the 'Love Supreme' motif, but he changes the key another time, another time, another time. This is something very unusual. It's not the way he usually improvises. It's not really improvised. It's something that he's doing. And if you actually follow it through, he ends up playing this little 'Love Supreme' theme in all 12 possible keys," says Porter. "To me, he's giving you a message here. First of all, he's introduced the idea. He's experimented with it. He's improvised with it with great intensity. Now he's saying it's everywhere. It's in all 12 keys. Anywhere you look, you're going to find this 'Love Supreme.' He's showing you that in a very conscious way on his saxophone. So to me, he's really very carefully thought about how he wants to present the idea."

While “A Love Supreme” is a recognized musical masterpiece, it had enormous personal significance for Coltrane. In the spring of 1957, his dependence on heroin and alcohol lost him one of the best jobs in jazz. He was playing sax and touring with Miles Davis' popular group when he became unreliable and strung out. Alternately catatonic and brilliant, Coltrane's behavior and playing became increasingly erratic. Davis fired him after a live show that April.

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Soon after, Coltrane resolved to clean up his act. He would later write, in the 1964 liner notes to “A Love Supreme,” "In the year of 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening, which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life."

But Coltrane didn't always stay the clean course. As he also wrote in the album's notes, "As time and events moved on, I entered into a phase which is contradictory to the pledge and away from the esteemed path. But thankfully now, through the merciful hand of God, I do perceive and have been fully reinformed of his omnipotence. It is truly a love supreme."

The album is, in many ways, a reaffirmation of faith. And the suite lays out what you might call its four phases: "Acknowledgement," "Resolution," "Pursuance" and "Psalms."

A Love Supreme has even spawned something of a religious sect. Reverend Franzo Wayne King is pastor of the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco. The congregation mixes African Orthodox liturgy with Coltrane's quotes and a heavy dose of his music. Pastor King calls the album the cornerstone of his 200-­‐member church.

"When you look at the composition of titles and the sequence in which John has them laid out, we say that there's formula in that album. When he says, 'Acknowledgements, resolutions and pursuance,' it's like saying, 'Father, Son and Holy Ghost.' It's like saying, 'Melody, harmony and rhythm.' In other words, you have to acknowledge and then you resolve and then you pursue, and the manifestation of it is a love supreme.

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PART V: SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING Books Burroghs, John. Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person. (1867, New York).

Noteworthy not only as first book on Whitman but also because partially ghost-­‐written

by Whitman.

Greenspan, Ezra, ed. Cambridge Companion to Whitman (1995). A compilation of essays on a variety of current critical preoccupations.

Hollis, C. Carrol. Language and Style in Leaves of Grass (1983). A good literary critical reading of Whitman’s art that emphasizes its roots in oratory and journalism.

Whitman’s Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text (1989). A strong reading of Whitman’s body poetry.

Kummings, Donald D. Walt Whitman, 1940-­‐1975: A Reference Guide (1982). A useful annotated second bibliography of cricitism about Whitman.

Lawrence, D.H. Studies in Classic American Literature (1923). A powerful appreciation of one remarkably original writer by another.

LeMaster, J.R. and Donald D. Kummings, eds. Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (1998). A handy reference work with entries on virtually every conceivable aspect of Whitman and Whitman-­‐related subjects.

Loving, Jerone. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. (1998). A well-­‐documented biography.

Miller, Edwin Haviland. Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: A Mosaic of Interpretations (1989). A line-­‐by-­‐line exegesis of the 1855 text stitched together from critics.

Myerson, Joel, ed. Whitman in His own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life (1991).

A collection of contemporary reviews and notices of Whitman by audiences.

Pollak, Vivian R. The Erotic Whitman (2000). A biographical-­‐critical study of gender, sexuality, and “textual sex” in Whitman’s writing.

Web I and You at Marin Theatre: http://marintheatre.org/productions/i-­‐and-­‐you/ Lauren Gunderson’s I and You blog: http://iandyouplay.tumblr.com/ Laurent Gunderston’s website: http://laurengunderson.com/ Walt Whiman on PBS American Experience: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/whitman/program/ PBS on John Coltrane: http://www.pbs.org/jazz/biography/artist_id_coltrane_john.htm Revising Himself, Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/whitman-­‐home.html Walt Whitman archive: http://www.whitmanarchive.org/

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