Jim Vrabel is a local historian and the author of
When In Boston: A Timeline &
Almanac (Northeastern University Press). He is co-author of John Paul II: A Personal Portrait of the
Pope and the Man (St. Martin’s Press).
A long-time neighborhood activist and former city official in Boston, he
now lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Jim attended the Graduate School of English at the University of Iowa,
which is where he first encountered John Berryman’s Dream Songs. After expecting others to do it, he
composed Homage to Henry: A Dramatization
of John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, an 80-minute one-man play by taking some
90 of the most brilliant and autobiographical of the songs - in whole or in part
- re-ordering them and adding a
very few lines of connecting text.
The play received a staged reading at the Charlestown Working Theater,
and has been performed for the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and
Writers at Boston University and at the Oberon Theater as a benefit for the
Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge.
Paul Mariani, Berryman’s biographer and a poet himself, calls Homage to
Henry “a sad and very human story, as stark in its way as anything in Samuel
Beckett.”
Jim is looking for additional opportunities to perform the play and can
be contacted at jimvrabel@gmail.com