"Everyone and I' at the Kimmel

Elizabeth Scanlon's Everyone and I is a performance piece based on Frank O'Hara's poem, The Day Lady Died.

It's an exquisite theatrical gem— moving, tender, too brief, as poignant and fleeting as a memory of a summer day. It could indeed be called a brief encounter between the poet and his muse, the blues singer Billie Holiday, except that the pair never met, except on paper.

To O'Hara, played in last week's production by an immensely likeable Mike Dees, nothing he experiences is real unless it's written down. "What would an Ode to a Grecian Urn be had not Keats immortalized it?" he asks us. "Just a pot."

Reminiscing in East Hampton

The simple scenic design and lighting effectively bring O'Hara and Holiday together in a natural way. The poet and critic, who curated many exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art, sits in a lawn chair on a patch of grass in East Hampton, reminiscing about July 17, 1959, the day he learned of Billie Holiday's death at the age of 44. Much of O'Hara's dialogue comes directly from his poetry collections, Meditations in an Emergency (1957) and Lunch Poems (1964). He remembers a performance Holiday gave, and there she is: an earthly, voluptuous and heartbroken woman, embodied in the superb actress Kimberly S. Fairbanks.

Wisely, director Kevin Glaccum chose to use vintage recordings of Holiday's haunting songs. But Fairbanks sounds like Holiday when she talks. Whether sitting in a chair in a nightclub or standing at the mike, she embodies the singer in Manhattan. A simple backdrop suggests the city, and a red velvet curtain creates a stage. Dressed in a white brocade dress with a large carnation in her hair, Holiday tells her story— the betrayals, the drugs, the constant need for money.

Hunger for boundless love

Poet and singer, it develops, share much in common. O'Hara relates what it's like to be part of the city. He always prefers concrete to the country but can enjoy a sunny day and a stiff martini.

Although Everyone and I is called a performance piece, it assumes a definite shape and progression. So let's call it a play. O'Hara speaks soulfully of his love for Larry Rivers. At the end of the 55-minute play, he reads from his poem, For the Harbormaster, which concludes: "I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love."

Holiday yearned for the same thing— boundless love— but even her mother refuses to help her when Billie finds herself broke, her earnings stolen by a ruthless husband.

The play's packed 55 minutes offer so much to take in that I returned the following night to see another performance. In the interim, I read the complimentary copy of the American Poetry Review that was distributed to each theatergoer. It contained a special section on O'Hara, including two pages of excerpts from Mediations in an Emergency.

Frank O'Hara died even younger than Billie Holiday— at age 40, in 1966. And as things have turned out, he was less widely appreciated. The Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts and the American Poetry Review have given him the belated recognition he deserves.