Jack Spicer’s Billy the Kid

Theatre of a Two-Legged Calf
at Mount Tremper Arts

By Brendan Connelly, Brooke O’Harra, and Lisa D’Amour / Featuring songs by Brendan Connelly / Director: Brooke O’Harra / Set and Lighting Design: Simon Harding / Costume Design: Alice Taverner

JACK SPICER’S BILLY THE KID is a performance that works to conjure and honor Jack Spicer: the poet, the activist, the renegade genius who died too young. We’ve transformed Spicer’s poem Billy the Kid into a series of songs, and have woven them together with excerpts from his lectures on poetry. Three outlaws – Are they poets? Are they gunslingers? Are they three parts of Jack Spicer? – meet in a room on the edge of some American frontier. Aliens, aliases and renegade desires (poetic, sexual) rise to the surface; manifestos are subverted/inverted/perverted in search of a language that can queer their world.