"This previously unpublished verse-drama presents the life of world-renowned escape artist and illusionist, Harry Houdini. Part biography, part fantasy, the musical leads us from Houdini's childhood in Appleton, Wisconsin (picking up pins with his eyelids) to his acts under water and his travels abroad. With pathos and playfulness, song and dance, Muriel Rukeyser introduces us to Houdini's wife Bess and his mother Cecilia, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the poet's own Marco Bone.

The musical presents Houdini's congressional testimony against spiritual mediums, and shows his great feats of escape, his complex relationships with his mother and his wife, and his ironic, untimely death on Halloween 1926.".

"Throughout this remarkable work, Rukeyser challenges the locks and constraints that imprison us all. She invites us to overcome whatever fears entrap us and - through the life of Harry Houdini - she shows us what it means to claim the freedom that is our birth right."--BOOK JACKET.