Long before the moniker "hipster" was applied liberally to anyone rocking a pair of skinny jeans and an ironic vintage tee, the Beats were going on the road, on the stage and sometimes on the police blotter, creating a new vision for America that veered far away from the complacency and conformity of the Eisenhower/McCarthy era. Marilyn Campbell's adaptation of Beat poetry, philosophy, and kinda-sorta biography, first staged at Writers' Theatre back in 1997, returns for our current age of discontent at 16th Street Theater. It feels less like a play than an impressionistic collage of voices and verses, memories and manifestoes, but as the success of Def Poetry Jam proved, there is an audience eager to hear passionate and witty dispatches from the culture wars, no matter the era.16th Street artistic director Ann Filmer steers a young and engaging five-member cast through two acts that draw from the words of Beats both famous (Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder and of course Allen Ginsberg, whose "Howl" remains the ur-text of Beat poetry) to lesser-known (Bob Kaufman, Ed Sanders and Hettie Jones — once married to LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, and, as the informative lobby display tells us, the person who helped Ginsberg with the Jewish prayer for the dead that formed the basis for his "Kaddish").
Though the actors are identified in the program as archetypes — Holy Hipster, Student, Dharma Bum, Jazz Cat and Beat Chick — they all eventually take on characteristics of particular Beat writers, with John Taflan's turn as the young and feverishly Beat-vangelic Ginsberg and Carly Ciarrocchi's incendiary delivery of Diane DiPrima's "Rant" ("The only war that matters is the war against the imagination!") being particular stand-outs.
Along the way, we learn some interesting factoids — such as the genesis of the iconic Beat finger snaps. (They were substituted for applause, which would bring down the wrath of noise-hating neighbors and police at poetry readings.) And since it's not a Beat happening without some jazz hepcats, it's great to hear the live drum-and-bass work from Grant Strombeck and Ivan Smalley (the latter substituting for regular bassist Doug Lofstrom).
There are a few moments in Campbell's script that feel precious — but then, the Beats were a youth-driven movement and it's the prerogative of young people to engage in self-indulgent myth-making. Not even the sneering coverage by Paul O'Neil of Life magazine (enacted here in a gleeful interlude) could derail the heady provocations of one of America's most transformative home-grown literary movements. And when the whole cast joins at the end in delivering "I Am Waiting" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (who braved obscenity charges in publishing "Howl" and is still, at nearly 92, keeping the movement fires burning), you may well feel like going out and searching for your own rebirth of hip and heartfelt wonder.
