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When Bart Buch was creating his “Ode to Walt Whitman” — a “poetic puppetry-infused adventure honoring two queer icons” — he was looking for love.

“The gay chat rooms were just starting to pop up at that point and it was fascinating to me,” Buch says. “Anybody who’s ever dated online or made connections online — it’s a very weird experience.”

“Ode to Walt Whitman” is currently playing at Open Eye Theatre

It’s a whimsical and aching multimedia performance of camaraderie, love and lust named after the poem Federico García Lorca published in 1930 in honor of Whitman, the American poet who died in 1892. 

Lorca’s poem explores the tenderness and homoeroticism of Whitman’s works, as well as the industrialization and urbanization of New York City and its effects on sensuality and human connection.

When the show was first mounted in the 2000s, in Minneapolis and New York, the puppet play was framed through Whitman and Lorca dialoguing — using excerpts from their poetry — in gay chat rooms online.

Since 2015, Buch has updated that to direct messages exchanged in the app Scruff; these DMs are projected on a screen.

“Not for one single moment, Beautiful Walt Whitman, have I ceased seeing your beard full of butterflies or your corduroy shoulders worn thin by the moonlight,” Lorca texts Whitman.

“Whoever you are holding me now in hand, without one thing all will be useless, I am not what you suppose, but far different,” Whitman responds. 

In addition to the text exchanges, accompanied by an electronica score and live music performance from composer Martin Dosh, there are puppets of all persuasions: finger, shadow, hand, stick-and-rod as well as oversized masks of Whitman and Lorca.

Buch says the play feels as poignant as ever. He originally started writing it after the 9/11 attacks.

“I was really disappointed in the country and the direction that it was taking after the attacks,” Buch says. “I feel like now the country has morphed, and I’ve changed, but the conversation is still really the same, and it’s gotten worse.”

He explains that Lorca, a Spanish poet, wrote his ode after visiting the U.S. on the brink of the Great Depression.

“Whitman had these idealistic, beautiful visions of a democracy built upon lovers and comrades,” Buch says. “Lorca visited the United States of America when the stock market crash happened in 1929. He witnessed this kind of underbelly of capitalism and the struggle and challenge of democracy. So, he had this conversation and I feel like my part in this conversation is through puppets.”

Reflecting on this creative output twenty years later, Buch says these kinds of stories are needed more than ever.

“There’s so many stories that are out there that are just riddled with greed and hate and fear, and we need stories to balance those out,” Buch says. “We’re fighting this war on empathy, imagination, connection, relation and that if we can just all tell our stories, it would help balance the other stories happening out there.”

He adds, “I really encourage people to be creative right now. We need it.”

Buch performs the hour-long piece with longtime puppeteer collaborators Masanari Kawahara and Ramon Cordes, along with his husband, Seth Eberle. Eberle and Buch just became fathers to a son. 

“This iteration of the show is dedicated to him and the beautiful, beautiful world that we want to create for him,” he said.

Alex V. Cipolle

Author

Bart Buch’s “Ode to Walt Whitman,” now at Open Eye Theatre, is a multimedia puppet performance inspired by Whitman and Lorca’s poetry and queer identities, reimagining their dialogue through modern gay dating apps to explore love, connection and democracy in troubled times.

‘Lovers and Comrades’: Bart Buch’s queer poetic puppet adventure at Open Eye Theatre in Minneapolis

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