Walt Whitman is coming back to Brooklyn, as we’ve never seen or heard him before — but, perhaps, as he was always meant to be: Spoken and sung from the mouths of women and men and children. Sung from on high in Fort Greene Park, from down low at the Old Stone House, and from a barge on the East River.
For nine days in May, an international collaborative of performing artists known as
Compagnia De Colombari will be presenting “More or Less I Am” — a theatrical and musical presentation of “Song of Myself,” arguably the greatest poem of Walt Whitman’s seminal Leaves of Grass, first published on July 4, 1855, out of a small print shop on Fulton Street in Brooklyn.
“Whitman is meant to be spoken and heard aloud,” says Karin Coonrod, Colombari’s founding artistic director. “I believe that Whitman’s words are meant to be unhinged from the pages and alive in the mouths of the people.
“We are building a little stage for the audience,” she explains. “I realized that we could not make this piece without activating the audience voice.”
Every night audience members will participate in speaking part of the text, joining the cast of five musicians, six actors, a gospel singer, a mezzo soprano and two children, who will be journeying through a whirlwind New York tour: nine shows at nine different venues in nine days (May 5-14).
“Whitman loved opera, so I knew we had to have a mezzo soprano,” said Coonrod. The piece will also include a section in Spanish, because, Coonrod says, Whitman is the “the New York Poet Laureate of the Americas.”
“He gives strong voice to the new world. For him ‘diversity’ is not medicine, it is joyous. This abundance is more present in the Americas than any place.”
The company has also scored original music for the hour-long performance. “There are echoes of many different musical styles represented in our piece,” says violinist Colin Jacobsen. “There are strands of the blues, old-time music and other American folk-styles. And there are sounds from other global music traditions, as we wanted to emulate Whitman’s hearty embrace of all of humanity, not just America ... It seems that he celebrates the music of the street as much as the music of the opera house; that he celebrates the life of the downtrodden as much as that of the President. I think that’s part of the spirit we wanted to capture.”
Whitman would probably approve of another aspect of “More or Less I Am.” Seven out of the nine shows will be free, and many of them will be held outdoors. The purpose, says Coonrod, is to “go outside and meet our audience in the public spaces, to make a thing of extravagant, ineffable beauty and offer it freely.”
One of the show’s venues, Fort Greene Park, partially owes its existence to Whitman, who wrote several editorials advocating for its creation while he was editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle from 1846 to ’48. Though Whitman’s itinerant life brought him to many places, he spent much of it, including his childhood, in Brooklyn, moving here at the age 4 with his family. By 11 his formal education was over and he worked as an office boy at a Fulton Street law firm. It wasn’t long before he took to printing and newspaper work, writing for nearly 10 other papers before becoming the editor of the Eagle at the age of 27.
Years after Leaves of Grass was first published, Whitman reflected, “Remember, the book arose out of my life in Brooklyn and New York from 1838 to 1853, absorbing a million people for 15 years, with an intimacy, an eagerness, an abandon, probably never equalled.”
The first performance of “More or Less I Am” will be a benefit at Bargemusic, an old coffee-barge turned concert venue anchored off Fulton Ferry Landing. Fulton Ferry was a familiar and beloved locale of Whitman’s. He took the ferry nearly everyday during his afternoon jaunts around the city, after finishing up his editorials in the morning. (Like with so many other seemingly ordinary things, Whitman took a rapturous and transcendent joy in the ferry, and wrote a poem about it, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”)
In addition to Fort Greene Park and the Old Stone House in Park Slope, “More or Less I Am” will be performed for free at Whitman’s birthplace in Huntington, Long Island, the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center in lower Manhattan, Marcus Garvey Park, Grant’s Tomb and The Wadleigh School in Harlem. The final show ($15) will be at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan, “not far from Pfaff’s, a beer pub at 653 Broadway, where Walt and a lot of other rowdies were regulars,” explained Coonrod.
“Whitman, like Shakespeare, is a miracle, fully present and penning what they heard from the surrounding vernacular,” says Coonrod, who teaches Shakespeare at the Yale School of Drama, and is best known for directing the epic Henry VI at the Public Theater. “Of American writers, Whitman has perhaps been most influential around the world.”
Whitman was 36 years old in 1855 when he released the first, 95-page, 12-poem edition of Leaves of Grass. “Song of Myself,” which had no title in the first edition, was the first poem in the book, and longer than the other 11 poems put together. He continued to revise and expand Leaves of Grass throughout his life. (The final “deathbed edition” would have 383 poems.)
But it is the first incarnation of “Song of Myself” that Compagnia De Colombari will be performing in May. “There is an urgency in it that I love,” says Coonrod. “Of course it is wonderful that Whitman kept reworking the piece, kept revising, just like many a poet and playwright. But I love the primal quality of the 1855 edition … The first is more pure to me, has more chutzpah.”
Also, she says, “It’s the one he broke out with in that time when the country was so polarized. I like going back to that original impulse that he had.”
Whitman, whose life spanned from 1819 to 1892, was witness to a fractious American century, and this played no small part in his life. His term at the Eagle ended because he took a more radical Democratic stance than his publisher: He rejected the expansion of slavery into new territories. He witnessed a slave auction in New Orleans, which many believe was a transformative event for the poet. He also served as a nurse in Washington, D.C. to both northern and southern soldiers during the Civil War.
“[‘Song of Myself’] is full of energy in an effort to reconcile the nation with words,” says Coonrod.
If Coonrod has her way, “More or Less I Am” will be performed every May (Whitman’s birthday is May 31) in other cities that share a connection with him, such as New Orleans and Washington, D.C.
“I believe that Whitman gives voice to all people and that is an exhilarating sentiment for our own time,” says Coonrad. “As Whitman himself says: ‘The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything…’”
Schedule of Performances
May 5 (Weds) 8 p.m., Barge Music at Fulton Ferry Landing, BENEFIT, $40. Call (718) 624-2083 for reservations.
May 6 (Thurs) 7 p.m., Fort Greene Park, FREE
May 7 (Fri) 8 p.m., Winter Garden World Financial Center, 200 Vesey St., FREE
May 8 (Sat) 7 p.m., Whitman Birthplace, 246 Old Walt Whitman Rd., Huntington, Long Island, FREE
May 10 (Mon) 11 a.m., The Wadleigh School, 114th St and Frederick Douglas Blvd., FREE
May 11 (Tues) 7 p.m., The Old Stone House in Washington Park, Third Street and Fifth Avenue, FREE
May 12 (Weds) 7 p.m., Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem, FREE
May 13 (Thurs) 7 p.m., Grant’s Tomb, Riverside Park near 122nd Street, FREE
May 14 (Fri) 7 p.m., Joe’s Pub, 425 Lafayette St., $15. Visit
www.joespub.com for tickets.
Above: The cast of “More or Less I Am,” Colin Jacobsen, Michael Rogers, Eric Jacobsen, Elliot Villar and Jorge Rubio. Seated are, Michael Potts, Ayeje Feamster, Sarah Heltzel and Kyle Sanna.
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