Concentration
Concentration
Words and Music from a Hard Place
Words: Arne Weingart
Music: Cherise Leiter
Direction: Andrew Schoen
Music Direction: Jordan Olive
Cast: Paul Brennan, Jeffrey Shapiro, Nina Silverstein, Vicki Walden
Suppose that a young poet were to have been swept up into one of the World War II death camps. There were many such young women and men in the camps—the sheer numbers make the argument. Concentration is an attempt to stand alongside them, three generations removed, with short, spare yet formally coherent poems that serve as a kind of journal—an entirely imaginary response to all-too-real and yet unthinkable events. These poems are given voice and presence here, along with accompanying original music. In 1904 Rilke wrote (in Letters to a Young Poet) that the highest human courage was to be found in our willing embrace of what is most strange, grotesque or inexplicable in our lives. Years later, in the most exigent of circumstances, a young poet writes back.
Chicago Dramatists (798 N Aberdeen)