Eddie Goes to Poetry City
“You’re a mirror, Eddie.”
Eddie dreams of escape—from the office where he suffers at the hands of his co-workers, from a doctor whose treatments seem far worse than any possible disease, perhaps from even the play itself! He dreams of escaping to Poetry City, a place he imagines to be Paradise. When he arrives, however, he finds that Poetry City “melts language,” and totally disrupts the normal laws of cause-and-effect. Entirely disoriented, Eddie attempts to navigate this new and bewildering reality, and slowly comes to consider that his confusion, struggles, and failures may comprise a sort of poetry in themselves and may provide access to Paradise after all. Not in Poetry City, but right here and now, hidden in between moments, but accessible to those who know where to look.
Foreman’s plays, particularly under the direction of Catastrophic core artist Greg Dean, are imagination machines. They provoke laughter or even tears from places so deep within, you didn’t know they were there. They poke and yank at the nerves and thrust you, id-first, into waking dreams. When you wander back into the world, you’ll find yourself awake in ways you hadn’t realized possible and you might find yourself in a new world, one vibrating with new possibilities.Read more
