A Star Has Burnt My Eye at BAM Fisher

In 1961, the polymathic songwriter Connie Converse grew disillusioned with music and New York, packed her bags for Ann Arbor, and eventually disappeared. Her home recordings from the 50s have only recently come to light—vulnerable, literary songs about loneliness, sexual longing, and bad credit—but they were unclassifiable at the time and she vanished without an audience or album to her name.

In this new play by songwriter and guitarist Howard Fishman, four musicians in a Brooklyn living room prepare for a concert of Converse’s music, rehearsing her songs, reflecting over lyrics, and pondering what it meant, and still means, to be an outsider artist. A treasure trove of recently discovered artifacts—personal letters, diary entries, poems, along with first-person recollections—come to life alongside intimate performances on guitar, piano, and accordion, in tribute to this enigmatic songstress whose fate still eludes.