Rimbaud in New York at BAM Fisher

He smoked a clay pipe, stole books, wrote hymns to bodily orifices, and, by the age of 21, had changed the face of literature forever. But then Arthur Rimbaud disappeared.

In this prismatic collage of song and story, theater company The Civilians (Paris Commune, 2012 Next Wave) use music-theater to consider the life and lasting influence of modernism’s most elusive enfant terrible. Staged musical renditions of original texts—John Ashbery’s seminal translations of the poet’s Illuminations, Rimbaud’s letters to his lover Verlaine—complement writer-director Steve Cosson’s meditations on the poet’s sexuality and influence on artists like Bob Dylan and Patti Smith. The result is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a man whose verbal alchemy made the bourgeois world blush.