Compiled by Charles M Peption, Virginia Sutfin, & Adam Pittman
University of Idaho
May 2002

Neal Cassady was the man behind a movement, and a man upon whom a movement was built. Neal Cassady is "Dean Moriarty" in Kerouac's classic On the Road. He is "Cody" in the follow up book Visions of Cody. Cassady was mentioned in Ginsburg's Howl as "N.C., secret hero of these poems." Simply put, Neal Cassady is the unsung hero of the beat generation.

I stumbled upon a letter written by Cassady to his children from prison. The letter was filled with parental wisdom, and it seemed to defy the beat generation icon. After further research, it was clear that I wanted to devise a piece of theatre around the life of Neal Cassady. I gathered a cast of two, Virginia Sutfin and Adam Pitman, and with them, began delving into the writings of Kerouac, Ginsburg, Neal Cassady, Carolyn Cassady, and many others looking for anything we could find about the man and his influence. Once the bulk of our research was completed, we began to improvise ways of using these texts in theatrical ways.

For example, we arranged, or braided, together selections from various texts. As a way of invoking the audience, we began the piece with Virginia singing "Pull My Daisy," a song written by David Amram, Kerouac, Cassady, and Ginsburg. From there we skipped to a letter known as "the Great Sex Letter," written by Cassady to Kerouac in the spring of 1947. The letter tells the story of Neal meeting and seducing a young woman on a bus. We staged this meeting and seduction using only Neal's words as dialogue. This created an interesting effect. The audience saw Neal in the situation, and they saw Neal describing the situation moving in and out of the action. We continued this method of compiling and arranging the texts.

The end performance was a script consisting only of found texts about Neal's life. We wrote nothing, relying on Kerouac, Ginsburg, and others to do the writing for us. The structure was episodic. At one point, the action flows from dialogue to poetry to a news clipping, but no matter the jump, we were careful to maintain a sense of theatricality. We concluded the piece with a dramatization of an actual phone call that took place after the death of Neal between Carolyn Cassady, Neal's widow, and Jack Kerouac. The final production was very much a work in progress, meaning we would all very much like to continue exploring this piece in the future.

*More infomation about this specific project and about devised theatre can be found here.