For one evening in October, the second-floor hall of the Lewiston Public Library will hold a visitor from Camden, New Jersey, by way of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Stephen Collins, a Shakespearean-trained actor with more than forty years of stage experience, will perform "Unlaunch'd Voices: an Evening with Walt Whitman" in Callahan Hall on Wednesday, Oct. 7, from 5 to 7 p.m. The show is free, requires no ticket or reservation, and runs about an hour before a question-and-answer session with the audience.
The premise is simple and strange in the way good theater often is. The audience is not watching a lecture about Walt Whitman. The audience is a visitor in his room on the evening of his seventieth birthday, watching the old poet prepare for his own celebration. Whitman, by then living in Camden, begins to reminisce and to doubt himself. His life's work, he tells us, has proved to be "less than a failure." From there the play moves backward, and the old man transforms into his younger, vibrant self as he traces the experiences that produced Leaves of Grass.
The first half of the performance follows Whitman's preoccupation with the self and his resolve to write with "free and brave thought." It is a portrait of a poet who celebrated his own body and his own person at a time when American letters had little patience for either, and who let the audience in on his struggle with his sexual self. The second half turns on the Civil War, which Whitman called the turning point of his life. He spent the war years visiting wounded soldiers in Washington hospitals, work he later described as "the most important work of my life." Through recitations of his poetry and readings of actual letters, the play follows his movement from selfishness toward selflessness and his growth into an artist at peace about "himself, God and death."
The script was conceived by Collins and written and directed by Michael Keamy. Its language is drawn from Whitman's poetry, especially Leaves of Grass, and from actual dialogue recorded during his life. Much of that dialogue survives because of Horace Traubel, a young friend and neighbor in Camden who wrote down their daily conversations and eventually published them as the six-volume "With Walt Whitman in Camden." Without Traubel's obsessive note-taking, the Whitman who speaks in this play -- the talker, the self-doubter, the man fussing over his own birthday -- would be largely lost.
The birthday itself is a matter of historical record. Whitman turned seventy on May 31, 1889, and Camden marked the occasion with a complimentary dinner in his honor, an event documented in a volume titled "Camden's Compliment to Walt Whitman." He was, by then, the author of a book that had been revised and reissued for decades and that had never quite settled into respectability. He died in Camden in 1892. The play's title comes from his own poetry, and its central tension -- a famous old man wondering whether he had amounted to anything -- is drawn from the historical record rather than invented for the stage.
Collins holds a bachelor's degree in literature from UMass Boston. He has performed as Whitman more than a thousand times, according to New Hampshire Humanities, which lists the program among its offerings. Reviewers have noted not only his physical resemblance to the poet but the way he brings the character within arm's reach of an audience; some writers, Collins' own site notes with evident pleasure, have switched his name and Whitman's interchangeably. He has lectured and performed at the Boston Public Library, for New Hampshire Humanities, and at the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association. When he is not on stage, he works as a professionally licensed tour guide giving historical tours of Boston -- a day job that is, in its way, the same trade: standing in front of strangers and making the past present.
That the show lands in Lewiston at all is a small piece of luck for local audiences. The Lewiston Public Library sits downtown at 200 Lisbon Street, and Callahan Hall is one of its public rooms. There is no admission charge, no registration, and no capacity barrier beyond the room itself. The Sun Journal listed the performance among its picks for the week, alongside an original 1776 Dunlap Broadside of the Declaration of Independence on display in Farmington and a Five for Fighting concert in Gardiner -- company that suits a play about a nineteenth-century poet who spent the Civil War in hospitals and the rest of his life insisting that the self was worth writing about.
For anyone who has only met Whitman on a syllabus, the appeal is the chance to meet him as a person: vain, tender, uncertain, and talking. The performance begins at 5 p.m. More information is available from the Lewiston Public Library at 513-3134 or [email protected].