Houdini: A Musical (Paris Press) - Softcover

Rukeyser, Muriel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1930464053 ISBN 13: 9781930464056

Publisher: Paris Press, 2002

Synopsis

This previously unpublished work presents the spectacular life of world-renowned escape artist, Harry Houdini. Part biography part fantasy, Houdini unlocks Rukeyser's worlds of illusion and reality as she leads us from Houdini's childhood in Appleton, Wisconsin (picking up pins with his eyelids) to his acts under water and onstage. We meet his wife Bess, his mother, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the poet's own Marco Bone, vehicle of voices, spirits, and songs. Rukeyser presents Houdini's shocking congressional testimony against spiritual mediums. She shows his great feats of escape, his complex relationships with his mother and his wife, and his ironic, untimely death.

In addition to revealing the story of this country's tantalizing icon, Houdini offers a new understanding of Rukeyser's own work and life. Written at the height of the women's movement, the musical gives us Rukeyser's most famous lines, spoken by Houdini's wife Bess: "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open." Houdini's response, "It has. Now I am going after it—all pieces." With subtexts of desire, race, grief, and love, Houdini presents Rukeyser's gorgeous, reaching language and her brilliant observations of the human psyche. The musical will appeal to young bell-bottomed readers as well as Houdini devotees, poetry fans, drama people, and escape artists everywhere.

A recipient of an NEA, Houdini joins the Rukeyser resurgence that is well underway—with the Paris Press publications of The Life of Poetry and The Orgy, and the University of Pittsburgh's 2002 reissue of The Collected Poems.

About this title

About the Author:

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) is one of our country's most influential yet neglected writers. She published fifteen collections of poetry, plays, translations, children's books, and several works of nonfiction. Her "toys of fame" include the Yale Younger Poets Award, the Copernicus Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Shelley Memorial Award. From 1975-1976, she served as president of P.E.N. American Center.

From Booklist:

Rukeyser (1913-80) wrote clarion poems that illuminate the interface of the personal and the political, children's books, plays, biographies, and one strange and beautiful verse drama, this metaphorically lush and wryly incisive interpretation of the psyche and art of Harry Houdini. Her musical was performed once in 1973 with Christopher Walken playing the title role, and then was set aside, unpublished until now. A powerfully provocative figure, Houdini inspires Rukesyer to ponder our love/hate relationship with the body, our desire for magic and acceptance of illusion, the link between exhibitionism and exorcism, and the eroticism of bondage and the myth of escapism. Rukeyser's Houdini is simultaneously a jaded performer who bamboozles his audience and a mystic, a man who vehemently attacked phony spiritualists yet who pined for communion with his dead. And then there's his wife, Bess, emblematic, for Rukesyer, of longing and stoicism, who utters one of the poet's most resounding lines, "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open." Donna Seaman
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About this edition

• Publisher: Paris Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1930464053
• ISBN 13: 9781930464056
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160