Elise

New York, 1962. Beat poet Elise Cowen commits suicide and her family incinerates all but eighty-three of her poems. Intertwining her surviving work with real interviews, Elise pieces together the true story of the woman shrouded by Ginsberg’s shadow. Elise explores the hedonistic, drug-fuelled culture of the Beatnik’s and how this society marginalised and damaged the women who chose to partake. The play hinges on events following her suicide, drawing together interviews and extracts from the eighty-three poems left unburnt by her parents, piecing together the true story of a woman obscured by the notoriety of her make contemporaries and set to a thrilling soundtrack of recordings, jive music and raucous jazz.