ODE TO WALT WHITMAN at Open Eye Theatre

Bart Buch’s visionary ODE TO WALT WHITMAN is a visually poetic puppet performance that weaves the spirits of two iconic queer poets—Walt Whitman and Federico García Lorca—into a contemporary dreamscape. Featuring a live score by acclaimed musician Martin Dosh.

Performed to sold-out audiences at New York City’s HERE Arts Center in 2009 and praised by the Jim Henson Foundation, ODE TO WALT WHITMAN is a tender, surreal journey told without spoken words. Puppets, shadows, projections, and live music craft an intimate dialogue between Whitman’s hopeful vision of America as a land of lovers and comrades, and Lorca’s mournful image of a nation awash in machines and tears.

Set in the unlikely but fitting landscape of an online gay chat, Buch’s silent puppet poem unfolds through hand puppets, bunraku-style grass puppets, shadow play, masks, toy theater, and a butterfly marionette. These layered forms create a rich, multidimensional visual language that speaks where words fall silent.

The live score—an organic electronica dreamscape by Martin Dosh—is tuned to the frequency of the universe (B-flat), becoming the breath of the show, vibrating with intimacy, urgency, and cosmic harmony.

“This show is a good poem, and good poems need to be read twice,” said Jane Henson, co-founder of the Jim Henson Foundation, after attending the New York premiere twice. 

City Pages' Quinton Skinner described ODE TO WALT WHITMAN as “a fully realized vision combining poetic sadness with a cosmic smile that even old corduroy-clad Walt would have endorsed.”