cover photo by Richard Anderson
“Eric Overmyer is not a
playwright who does things simply, so it's probably not enough to
say that his latest theatrical conceit, THE HELIOTROPE BOUQUET BY
SCOTT JOPLIN AND LOUIS CHAUVIN is a dream play. It's really three dreams
wrapping themselves around one another like languid
tendrils of opium smoke stirred by a ceiling fan.
The first dreamer is Scott
Joplin, widely heralded as the king of the ragtime composers,
although when we initially meet him, slumped over a piano by the
dim light of a Harlem morning, fame and inspiration are behind
him, and his tortured mind is obsessed with sultry images of the
`poxy girls' in the House of Blue Light, a New Orleans sporting
house he frequented as a youth.
The second, more impertinent,
dreamer is Louis Chauvin—Joplin's match, if not his better, in
the art of syncopation—who had the misfortune (or the
contrariness) to leave nothing behind him when he died of
multiple sclerosis at twenty-six. The only concrete evidence of his genius is
Heliotrope Bouquet, the slow drag two-step he wrote with Joplin, who saw to it
that the sheet music got published. The third dreamer is Mr Overmyer himself, who has seized upon
this fleeting collaboration and its few tangible details as the
pretext for some graceful musings about the ephemeral nature of
art and reputation....”
David Richards, The New York
Times
“Resounding with the
bittersweet mood and slow grace of the ragtime music it
celebrates, Eric Overmyer's THE HELIOTROPE BOUQUET BY SCOTT
JOPLIN AND LOUIS CHAUVIN is an elegiac fever dream of a play, a
skillful weaving of fact and fancy played against a backdrop of
memory, loss and the redemptive power of art....
Overmyer's insertion of
fantastical elements into conventional narrative has been used to
comic, or at least whimsical, effect before, notably in his ON
THE VERGE, OR THE GEOGRAPHY OF YEARNING. But in HELIOTROPE, the
playwright spins this technique into a poignant composition
peppered with moments of joyful release....
Overmyer's rich, clever dialogue
gives the play a sumptuous feel....
Running under an hour and a
half, HELIOTROPE is less like the ambitious ragtime opera that
consumed Joplin's final years than the brief but startling
collaboration that gives the play its name. Ending on a tentative
note of hope and revival, Overmyer adheres to Joplin's musical tenet of `sweet
resolution' even as the cynical Chauvin's admonition lingers: `Sweet
resolution,' he tells Joplin, `is the difference between music and life.'”
Greg Evans, Variety
originally produced by Center Stage, Baltimore
6 M, 5 F
I S B N: 0-88145-108-8, $8.95