Jack Kerouac shot to fame after his jazz- and drug-infused book, On the Road, hit stores in 1957. During that hot period the autobiographical novelist also wrote his only play, The Beat Generation.
The play was never produced and all but forgotten. The lost work, however, was rediscovered in 2004 and is now set to premiere in the writer's hometown of Lowell, Mass.
Charles Towers, artistic director at the Merrimack Repertory Theater, remembers exactly what he thought after Kerouac's lost play was uncovered.
"They just found the only play he ever wrote, [and] it needs to bе done in Lowell before it's done anywhere else," Towers says.
After years of pursing the rights to produce it, Towers is staging The Beat Generation as a jazzed-up reading for this week's Jack Kerouac Literary Festival. He insists it's not a "theatrical" event, however, like the premiere of a lost play by Tennessee Williams might bе.
"This is finding a lost play by a novelist; so it's a literary event," he says. "So that's really the difference. He's not a playwright ... This was his one attempt."
That attempt in 1957 did not impress Kerouac's longtime literary agent Sterling Lord.
"Because I didn't think it offered anything new," Lord says.
Lord says the play featured the same beat characters you find in On the Road, just with different names. He also didn't think he could sell it. Lord, who represented Kerouac throughout his career, showed it to a few Broadway producers anyway, at the writer's request.
"I think I even sent it to Marlon Brando, again at Jack's request, although I frankly didn't have any hopes for it because I didn't think it was that effective, quite honestly," he says. "Finally Jack said, 'Look, put it away.' Well, put it away I did."
Lord says he put the play very deeply into his files. When he dug the play out and revisited it in 2004, he says this time, he was amazed at what he read.
"I found it a very exciting play," he says. "And of course part of the excitement and part of the value of it was the authenticity that I felt as I was reading it."
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