Jack Kerouac - On the Stage

Jack Kerouac play to receive world premiere
Beat Generation will debut at this year's Jack Kerouac Literary festival in Massachusetts, 55 years after it was written

Matt Trueman
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 13 March 2012

Jack Kerouac's only full-length play will receive its world premiere this year, 55 years after it was written.

Beat Generation, a three-act play rediscovered in a New Jersey warehouse in 2005, will be staged for the first time this October in Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. The Merrimack Repertory Theatre and the University of Massachusetts Lowell will deliver eight performances of staged reading as the centrepiece of this year's Jack Kerouac Literary festival.

Written in 1957, shortly after the publication of On the Road, Beat Generation shows a day in the life of Jack Duluoz, Kerouac's drink-and-drug-fuelled alter ego. The play draws on his own life and those of other Beat writers including Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg, who subsequently starred in the film Pull My Daisy, which was based in part on the play.

Kerouac had sent his work to numerous producers and actors, including Marlon Brando, in an attempt to drum up interest for a production, but after failing to do so asked his agent Sterling Lord to shelve the script.

On its rediscovery in 2005, Lord said: "It conveys the mood of the time extraordinarily well, and also the characters are authentically drawn."

The author's biographer Gerald Nicosia said at the time: "Kerouac wrote the play in one night when he returned to his home in Florida after the publication of On the Road." The play was commissioned by off-Broadway producer Leo Gavin, but remained unpublished until 2005 and unperformed until now.

"This is a moment of literary and theatrical history," said Charles Towers, artistic director of the Merrimack.

The production was announced on Monday, coinciding with the US publication of Kerouac's "lost" first novel, The Sea Is My Brother, written when he was 21. The novel, in which two young men travel from Boston to Greenland, was published in the UK last November.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/mar/13/jack-kerouac-play-world-premiere?INTCMP=SRCH