Creativity Fund: Carlos Murillo's The Javier Plays

Carlos Murillo

A Thick Description Of Harry Smith
by Carlos Murillo
directed by Kip Fagan

Who was Harry Smith? Underground Renaissance genius? Or a maniacal trickster? Or both and everything in between? A Thick Description Of Harry Smith is a raucous exploration of the life, work and legacy of Harry Everett Smith. Best known as the editor of the seminal Folkways Anthology of American Folks Music – which single-handedly spurred the folk revival of the late 50s and served as a Rosetta Stone of American music to generations of musicians and artists – Harry Smith had a hand in everything: he was an experimental filmmaker, folklorist, anthropologist, painter, paper airplane collector, expert in the occult, and alchemist, who wove in and out of the many faceted worlds of the American underground. A Thick Description Of Harry Smith is a medicine show of sorts – a psychedelic Prairie Home Companion with live music, foley work, and an array of American characters both iconic and anonymous. The play is a hilarious and mysterious meditation on an American enigma.

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The Creativity Fund offers playwrights extended time to explore and develop new plays and musicals up to five days.

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The Creativity Fund is made possible by a lead grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and sustained by significant support from the Time Warner Foundation and the Scherman Foundation's Katharine S. and Axel G. Rosin Fund.