The Heliotrope Bouquet by Scott Joplin and Louis Chauvin

February 05, 1993 – March 21, 1993
Anne G. Wilder Theater

Written by Eric Overmyer
Directed by Joe Morton

• “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