Eat the Document
In the heyday of the seventies underground, Bobby DeSoto and Mary Whittaker – passionate, idealistic, and in love – design a series of radical protests against the Vietnam War. When one action goes wrong, the course of their lives is forever changed. The two must erase their past, forge new identities, and never see one another again.
Now it is the 1990s. Mary lives in the suburbs with her fifteen-year-old son, Jason, who spends hours immersed in the music of his mother’s generation. She has no idea where Bobby is, whether he is alive or dead. A few towns away, an aging hippie calling himself Nash presides over an anarchist bookstore, drawing the disaffected youth of the next generation into a shifting series of “groups” and “collectives.” Miranda, alone among the kids who frequent the bookstore, takes Nash seriously.
Shifting between the protests in the 1970s and the consequences of those choices in the 1990s, Eat the Document, based on the novel by Dana Spiotta, explores the connection between the two eras—their language, technology, music, and activism.
Eat The Document is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. We are also grateful for support from Nancy & Jim Barton, Joan Desens and Simon Carr-Ellison, Robert Ellis, Gene Kaufman & Terry Eder-Kaufman, Ann D. McChord, Thomas Simpson, and Faith E. Gay & Francesca Zambello. Eat The Document received developmental support from American Opera Projects, Baryshnikov Arts Center, The Center for Fiction, Joe’s Pub and HERE.