If you’ve ever snapped photos along Kerouac Alley, or have been caught reading On the Road while tossing back a few at Vesuvio, then chances are you’re a Jack Kerouac fan. Well, there’s good news for you. Traipsing wide-eyed through North Beach is no longer the only way to relive the life and times of the famed Beat icon; Mr. Kerouac is now on Twitter.
Reorbit, a new kind of theater company that uses new media technology, like Twitter, has launched a collection of first person plays that feature historic, and often whimsical, figures as they go about their daily lives. The company recently teamed up with playwright and sociologist Audrey Sprenger to produce a Jack Kerouac piece with a twist; Jack Kerouac is alive and well. The story imagines that the man who is thought to have died in Florida in 1969 after years of alcohol abuse was not in fact the iconic Beat movement author, but rather, an imposter. The real Jack, eager to escape fame and fortune, resettled to a small French Canadian town under the pseudonym Jean Louis Lévesque, an 89-year-old painter, who has given up writing, money and fame to live anonymously with his beautiful wife of 40 years. The play, available at the Reorbit website, as well as on Twitter, is written from Jack’s first person perspective, and published in convenient, Twitter friendly, 140 character bursts.
“The Kerouac play is a fiction that may or may not be true,” says Sprenger, the author. “That is, it comes from my imagination, but every single part of it, (the settings, the characters, the conversations, the plot-lines) could have happened.”
For the play to feel as real as possible, as though the real Kerouac is broadcasting his musings across Twitter, Sprenger took inspiration from some of Kerouac’s close personal and professional relationships. She solicited composer and long-time Kerouac collaborator David Amram to score the play, and hopes she can convince Amram, along with City Lights co-founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti, to make a brief cameo towards the end of the play. Both would appear as themselves, naturally, who also happen to be the only two people Jack keeps in touch with from his old life.
It almost sounds real. But could it be?
“When following ‘Jack Kerouac’ and deciding whether they believe it is actually him or not readers have a choice: To simply believe what I, as Kerouac, say, or, even better, take all the evidence I create through this story and go out into the world and see if it checks out, see if it’s true,” says Sprenger.
So, next time you’re walking through North Beach, take out that smart phone, launch your Twitter app, and see what Jack’s really up to.
Reorbit will be launching a new series of plays starting July 1, and is currently accepting writing submission.
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