Overview
On June 5th in the year 1900 the celebrated American writer Stephen Crane died of tuberculosis in the Black Forest, Germany, a little more than five months short of his 29th birthday. In the year or so before that he had lived with his mistress, Cora Taylor, pioneering female journalist and former brothel keeper, in a damp old haunted mansion, Brede Place, in Sussex, considered by some to be the most haunted house in England. There was a remarkable little colony of writers living around Romney Marsh at this time, including Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling and Ford Madox Ford, who visited regularly back and forth with the Cranes and with one another. While living at Brede, Crane became fascinated with the ghosts, and at the end of his life was attempting to write about them. Not long after, dying in the Black Forest, his brain was never at rest, reliving everything as a dream, trying to finish his ghost story before he died. This dark, funny, and moving play is the story of those last months of Stephen Crane's life, of the carryings on of that remarkable and eccentric group of writers, and of an eerie double love story, between Crane and his earth mother consort Cora, and also between the dying writer and a compelling young lady who is either a mad girl escaped from an asylum or one of the ghosts. James, Wells, Conrad and Ford all make memorable appearances here, as does a bloodthirsty but stage-struck Ogre.