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In Moxie Theatre’s new filmed production of Lauren Gunderson’s moving play “I and You,” the dying teen character Caroline is fighting so hard to stay alive, she can’t or more accurately, she won’t let anybody inside her heart. Then Walt Whitman enters her room.
Not the famed 19th-century American poet himself, but Anthony, a fellow senior at Caroline’s high school who shows up begging for her help on a shared literature project about Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The 1,300-line autobiographical poem, which Whitman tinkered with from 1855 to 1881, explores grand questions about the self versus humanity, the conscious and the unconscious mind, pain and beauty, and man’s relationship with the universe.