Whitman in Love 2026
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Summoners Ensemble Theatre in association
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This Pride Month, Whitman in Love, starring John Kevin Jones (A Christmas Carol at the Merchant’s House; Killing an Evening with Edgar Allan Poe), comes to the garden of the Merchant’s House Museum for a limited run – June 24 to June 28 only.
American journalist, essayist, and pioneering LGBTQ poet Walt Whitman took nightly refuge at Pfaff’s beer cellar just blocks from the Merchant’s House on Broadway at Bleecker Street, a bohemian gathering place where he found community, inspiration, and the human intimacy that shaped his work. For five performances only in the Museum’s jewel-box garden, audiences will encounter the deeply personal love poetry of Whitman in an intimate theatrical setting that brings them face-to-face with one of the most powerful and revealing strands of his work.
Whitman in Love draws from the poet’s “Live Oak, with Moss” — a sequence of poems widely recognized as among the earliest sustained expressions of same-sex love in American literature. Composed in the 1850s and later camouflaged in the Calamus section of Leaves of Grass, the poems trace an emotional arc of desire, tenderness, heartbreak, and resilience. Whitman in Love places these verses in conversation with the voices and relationships that shaped Whitman’s inner life and artistic imagination. The result is a theatrical portrait of the poet not as monument, but as a man: yearning, beloved, vulnerable, and transformed by love.
John Kevin Jones said, “Whitman wrote of love in ways that transcended the boundaries of his time. During Pride Month, we honor him as a queer ancestor—an artist who insisted that love between men was worthy of poetry, dignity, and song.”
Wine and light beverages will be offered in the garden. In case of rain the performance will move indoors to the grand Greek-Revival parlor.
