As the first week of June comes to a close, the celebration of Pride and the LGBTQ+ community starts as Open Eye Theatre presents “Ode to Walt Whitman,” created and performed by Bart Buch and Company. 

This puppet performance is dedicated to two well-known queer poets, Walt Whitman and Federico García Lorca, and will run until Sunday. The show provides the audience with an interpretive experience through different sets and scenes depicting Whitman and Lorca interacting with one another in a world outside of the one they knew.

The show features a live score performed by multi-instrumentalist Martin Dosh, and sold out New York City’s HERE Arts Center in 2009, according to Open Eye Theatre. 

The performance is set in an online dating app among many other dreamlike sets, but uses no words. The different puppetry art styles, lighting and shadow play, as well as immersive music, allow for the audience to observe the emotions rather than be told exactly how the characters are feeling. 

Martin Dosh said audiences can expect a wide variety of emotions to play out throughout the show as well as within the music itself. 

“Melancholy, joy and wonder — those are emotions that naturally come with a lot of my music and that mapped out really nicely to the actual story and parts of it are really quite funny too,” Dosh said. “So it’s like humor, beauty, wonder and obviously sadness.” 

Dosh mixed organic and electric sounds to give an air of wonder and uniqueness, unlike other forms of music. The creator of the show, Bart Buch, said the music and the show were a perfect match for one another. 

“I feel like the imagery I put out there and the music he puts out there are a really sweet match that was sort of made to be,” Buch said. “I’ve done puppetry to a lot of different kinds of music, but his is the best.” 

Buch said the inspiration for the show came from Lorca’s own “Ode to Whitman,” as Lorca had just visited the United States at the time of the stock market crash in 1929. Lorca wrote his poem to honor Whitman but also to criticize the urbanization and industrialization of New York City, disagreeing with some of Whitman’s hopeful ideals. 

“So that conversation really intrigued me, and I wanted to enter the conversation in my own way,” Buch said. “I started out as an artist, as a poet, and I write word poetry sometimes too, but I was really called to be a puppet artist, a puppeteer. So that was the most natural way for me to enter the conversation.” 

The show is immersive and hypnotizing at times, calling out the modern world we live in today. 

Jane Henson, co-founder of the Jim Henson Foundation, attended the premiere in New York City more than once and said the show deserved to be seen twice. 

“This show is a good poem, and good poems need to be read twice,” Hensen said. 

Open Eye Theatre said the show is a reminder of the tension our world faces today and represents the hope of a more connected future for us all. 

“In a moment of rising anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, censorship, and cultural division, ‘ODE TO WALT WHITMAN’ speaks with renewed urgency,” Amy Danielson, the theatre’s marketing and public relations manager, wrote. “Lorca’s grief over a dehumanized America and Whitman’s dream of a nation built on love and comradeship mirror today’s tensions between isolation and connection, fear and hope.”