EudoraWeltyOnstage.com
The stories of America's great writer performed onstage

A Fire Was In My Head

Eudora Welty's enigmatic short story Music from Spain performed by actress Brenda Currin and pianist Philip Fortenberry is now a new theatrical adaptation by director David Kaplan titled A Fire Was In My Head.

To hear a WNYC radio interview and sample of A Fire Was in My Head click here

Unlike Welty's more usual Mississippi settings, the story of A Fire Was In My Head is set in San Francisco. It tells of a man who inexplicably smacks his wife at breakfast, walks out the door, decides not to go to work, and instead spends his day wandering from the heights of San Francisco to Land's End in the mysterious company of a Spanish guitarist who doesn't speak English.

A Fire Was In My Head takes Miss Welty’s words and sets them to music inspired by the repertory of the Spanish guitarist Andres Segovia, whose performance in San Francisco sparked Miss Welty’s idea for the original story written while she was living in that city far from her home in Jackson. Mississippi.

In a performance of A Fire Was In My Head short haunting compositions by Mompou and Bach, the well-known Leyenda by Albeniz and Enrique Granados’ passionate Orientale, share the stage with the 1947 novelty song “Open the Door, Richard” and a Mississippi blues treatment of “Rocks in My Bed.”

Shown as a work-in-progress under the title "He felt ..."at the American Literature Association Convention in San Francisco in May 2004, then at the Appalachian Summer Festival in Boone, North Carolina in July 2004, A Fire Was In My Head had its world premiere in New York on April 11, 2005 at The 92nd Street Y's Kaufman Hall, followed by a performance April 16th at Rogers Memorial Chapel in New Orleans.