“A poem is wonderful because you can take a moment of your life and spin it around in a million directions. But with a play you could look at a week in your life, or a year, and . . . connect all the dots.”
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Directed by Shelly Carlsen and adapted by Okita, In One Art, Out the Other makes up the first weekend of “Poetry Under the Lights,” an eight-weekend series produced by another collaboration–this time between Live Bait and City Lit Theater. The aim of the series, say the producers, is to present poetry as theater.
“I was very interested in all the poetry readings going on in the city,” says Sharon Evans, artistic director of Live Bait, “and I thought it might be exciting to match poets with directors and designers to create theater pieces inspired by their poetry.” She brought together a diverse group–actors, architects, musicians, dancers, playwrights, performance artists. But they all had three common bonds: a love of poetry, an interest in moving back and forth between poetry and other art forms, and a curiosity about their motivation for doing so.
The Hero’s Journey, like Carver’s book, uses narration to link Carver’s poems; the end result provides details of his love affair with another poet, his recovery from his near-fatal alcoholism, and his battle with cancer. It also depicts Carver’s struggle to finish his last work. “The question hanging over Carver the whole year,” says Richard, “was, ‘Are we going to finish this book?’”
