Unlaunch'd Voices

 
 

The play opens with the elderly Whitman on the evening of his seventieth birthday. The audience is a visitor in his room as he prepares for his birthday celebration. Whitman begins to reminisce and to question his success as a man and a poet. He tells us his work has proved to be “less than a failure....” He remembers a mystical experience he had in his thirty-seventh year that inspired him to write poetry.

During the telling, Whitman transforms into his young vibrant self and we begin to trace back along with him the experiences that led to the creation of Leaves Of Grass, his lifetime work. Act one explores Whitman’s preoccupation with the self and his resolve to write with “free and brave thought...” We revel with him as he celebrates his body and himself and are confidants as he shares his struggle with his sexual self.
In act two Whitman’s life is changed forever by the occurrence of the Civil War. It is here that he finds “... the most important work of my life...” nursing the wounded soldiers in the hospitals. Through poetry and readings of actual letters, we experience Whitman’s movement from selfishness and selflessness and his growth into a mature artist who is at peace about “himself, God and death.”