The following articles appeared in Actors Theatre's subscriber newsletter prior to the 1998 Humana Festival

TI JEAN BLUES
"I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me," wrote Jack Kerouac in his novel On the Road, "because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars."

Kerouac’s joyful and haunting expressions of his thirst for experience came to characterize a generation of artists in the 1950s—the Beat Generation—whose lives and art intertwined in their search for a new consciousness, for a way to find individual voices in the atmosphere of postwar conformity, and faith in the face of suffering. Kerouac’s fascinating, "mad" quest is detailed in the fictionalized chronicles of his life, a body of work based on his own relationships with other Beat figures and going back to his experiences as "Ti Jean" (little Jean) growing up in Lowell, Massachusetts. The ambitious design of Kerouac’s writing is matched by the exhilarating beauty of his language, and it is this brilliant energy which JoAnne Akalaitis brings to the stage with Ti Jean Blues, her adaptation of Kerouac’s literature and other accounts of his life.

Having been previously developed in staged readings at the New York Theatre Workshop, PS 122, St. Mark’s Church, and a workshop in Toronto, Ti Jean Blues will receive its first full-scale production at this year’s Humana Festival. Originally commissioned for the magazine Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, the piece has made Akalaitis realize the extent of Kerouac’s talent. "When I was a youth at university, I read On the Road and it changed my life forever," she says. "It was interesting for me to come back to Kerouac after not having really looked at him since I was 23, and to be amazed at what a great writer he is—what a great American genius." And it is Kerouac’s struggle as an artist—"his constant exuberance and at the same time self-doubting, and depression, and anxiety, and turmoil"—which Akalaitis also finds compelling.

In addition to embodying this rebellious energy of the Beats—the sex, restless travel, drugs, aching spirituality, depression—Ti Jean Blues also captures Kerouac’s uniquely American approach to remembering family and imagining home. "There’s something very deliriously juicy about his tapping into family history," explains Akalaitis. "This is quite American— the way that we love to confess. We love to talk about our families—how screwed-up they are, and how wonderful they are at the same time."

Kerouac believed that "memories are inseparable from dreams," and his writing was both an attempt to remember and to transform the experience of writing itself. Cultivating his own artistic process, "spontaneous prose," he tried to capture the true rhythms of his own thought, without revision or self-censorship. "Kerouac changed the American literary language," notes Akalaitis. "He took the dynamic of jazz and put it into literature. It may not be that there’s a generation that writes in the style of Kerouac’s oeuvre, but that doesn’t matter. Someone takes the language and makes an imprint on it—and it has changed."

It is this deep connection with jazz improvisation that makes Kerouac’s writing so well-suited for performance, and so expressive of a new impulse in the history of our art and culture. "The newest American expression in this century was jazz," says Akalaitis, "the greatest expression of American culture. And I don’t think it’s any accident that the Beats were so connected to jazz." The Beats often read their work to music—for they believed in the performative nature of their writing, in its vitality as spoken word—and Ti Jean Blues explores this sense of rhythm by integrating the music of jazz greats such as Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, and Lester Young.

"It’s a choral piece, and it’s extremely complicated vocally and musically," says Akalaitis, explaining that the five actors in the piece together represent Kerouac’s journey. "The actors are making the music and the music is making the music. I would like to see if people can speak on the stage the way that jazz plays." Using a physical language of "mudras," codified gestural expressions adapted from the kathakali theatre of Southern India, Ti Jean Blues renders an emotional terrain that is as visually intense as it is aurally rich.

Kerouac and the Beats were not simply an isolated literary movement, but also became a social phenomenon—a vision of a generation both beatific and beaten, suffering and joyful, which infiltrated popular culture and turned the American Dream on its head. Noting the recent surge of interest in the Beats which seems to cut across generations and classes, Akalaitis argues that there is something about this era which speaks to us in the late 1990s: "The piece alludes to the 1950s and early 60s, but it looks like everything. It looks like today… It’s a voice that is eternally youthful. And there’s something about the rhythm of it that is right for us now. It is a thoroughly contemporary rhythm."

And so as Ti Jean Blues weaves together the beauty and pain of one artist’s journey, we share an unnerving and moving connection to Kerouac’s unique energy—and to his soulful search for America, meaning, and salvation in a terrifying, wondrous world.

— Amy Wegener