In “Jetblack Sunrise,” actor and innkeeper Michael Fegley is creating a pastiche of Walt Whitman poetry in performance at the Charles A. Brown Ice House, Bethlehem. His show continues January 25 and 26, and he will reprise it Feb. 21-23 at the Nurture Nature Center in Easton.
He gathered his script from the first edition of the poet’s “Leaves of Grass” and the poem “Song of the Open Road.” (It’s not a bad idea to read a bit of these before attending the performance.)
This is not the kind of academic droning you may remember from poetry readings you’ve experienced before. Directed by Daniel Amenda, Fegley transforms himself into Whitman (1819-1892 ) as a modern-day vagabond. He arrives on stage to find a trash heap in which he discovers props that help him be a middle-aged man ruminating about love, war, death, and the importance -- or not -- of the individual.
Whitman was a pioneer of free verse, the liberation from strict rules of rhyme and rhythm that had regulated poetry since ancient times.
Using Whitman’s words, Fegley speaks in the kind of intimate voice you expect between friends. The small upstairs theatre at the Ice House, where the boundary between actor and audience is thin, is a perfect space for this kind of effort.
But Fegley’s intimacy also creates the problem of insufficient volume: Fegley is intense and sincere enough, but often speaks too quietly for the audience to hear every word -- and it is important to hear every one of Whitman’s words. On the other hand, the background music was an unobtrusive volume which added to the transcendental mood.
Several memorable selections are from Whitman’s Civil and Mexican wartime poems written while he visited wounded warriors in New York hospitals. He wrote the poem “Jetblack Sunrise” to commemorate the 1836 “murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve young men” at Goliad, Texas, during the war with Mexico. While speaking these lines, Fegley picks up discarded mannequin body parts and piles them in a bier covered with colored cloths which he then “lights” with a red covering.
Fegley has produced an interesting experience in theatre, appropriate to our public and personal times and an important appreciation of the work of one of America’s greatest poets.
“Jetblack Sunrise,” 8 p.m. Feb. 21-23, Nurture Nature Center, 518 Northampton St., Easton. Email m8nebula.ticketleap.com.