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The Heliotrope Bouquet by Scott Joplin and Louis Chauvin

  • Written by Eric Overmyer
  • Directed by Joe Morton
February 05 - March 21, 1993
The Heliotrope Bouquet by Scott Joplin and Louis Chauvin




Featuring

Lisa Arrindell

Donna Biscoe

Duane Boutte

Herb Foster

Steve Harris

Mike Hodge

Amber Kain

Delroy Lindo

Ramon Moses

Tonye Patano

Kim Yancey

Creative Team

Richard Hoover

Scenic Designer

Judy Dearing

Costume Designer

Phillip Monat

Lighting Designer

Bruce Odland

Sound Designer

Lloyd Davis, Jr.

Production Stage Manager

Louis Johnson

Choreographer

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