Daphne the Cynic is about labor, consciousness, and the search for meaning within broken systems. It is absurdist.
It is also a musical comedy about vomit.
In this world, gods, kings, and bureaucracies maintain social order by convincing mortals that their suffering is predetermined. The workers of the Vomitorium have accepted their roles because they believe they must. At the beginning of the musical, Daphne survives through cynicism, routine, and emotional detachment.
Her sudden awareness of her own consciousness — “having a thought” — disrupts her understanding of herself and the world around her. If her life is not entirely predetermined by the gods, then why has she accepted it for so long? Why does she help maintain a system that exploits both herself and others?
Icarus enters the story after surviving his legendary fall from the sky. Rather than becoming enlightened or heroic, he becomes fascinated by the absurdity of survival itself. Sisyphus, aka “Sis,” enters the story after they uncannily lose control of their rock and it crashes into the Vomitorium. Both Icarus’s and Sis’s philosophies reflect the “absurd hero” described by Albert Camus: a person who confronts a meaningless or indifferent universe without surrendering to despair, false hope, or illusion. Together, with Daphne, they begin to understand that while existence may not contain inherent meaning, human beings can still create meaning through care, solidarity, humor, work, and community.
Humor is a survival mechanism, and eventually, an act of resistance.
Letter from the Writer – Eddie Bean
“ My first brush with death was in second grade when my blood sugar suddenly plummeted during a test. An overdose of insulin. Apparently I took too much Novolog to compensate for a raspberry toaster strudel.
In a stupor I stood up from my desk singing, and twirled around the classroom. The nurse called Dad. I remember sitting in the back of his Jeep sipping on a juice box. Dad was scared. I was 8.
One small miscalculation can end in a coma or death. I calculate everything because managing a relentless autoimmune disease has no days off. But choosing to pursue meaning despite this has saved me. By sticking around and writing musicals I’m able to turn vigilance into connection. Metrics into emotion.
Theatre allows me to escape my body. To transport to another place, to become a character with a working pancreas. Unsurprisingly, my medical diagnosis and my musical theatre obsession arrived at the same time.
Music is rhythmic and tonal control within chaos. Writing music and lyrics demands poring over details that, when heard in time, feel effortless. Inevitable. My disease requires constant counting. Counting became a fixation on details: beat-by-beat, syllable-by-syllable. I love wrestling sprawling emotional chaos into shape. And I’m not always sure what gets ironed out in the process of making it make sense. The question I’m still chasing is what can’t be measured, what disappears when everything aligns too cleanly.
The body that taught me to count everything has made me investigate the systems we build to impose order on chaos: medical, economic, bureaucratic, divine. I want disability to expand the lens of musical theatre, not merely its roster of characters. My experience of bodily dependence shapes how I write about labor, institutions, power, and who gets to exercise agency.
My musicals center on outsiders who throw wrenches in the machinery and immerse audiences in the machine.
Daphne the Cynic turns bureaucratic burnout and class consciousness into an absurdist queer comedy about mortals serving slop to gods, with the theater retrofitted as an ancient workplace facility.
Elsewhere, I’ve used puppets to materialize social media algorithms, site-specific performance to embody environmental catastrophe, and audience participation to implicate spectators in ritual sacrifice after gothic election horror. They explore the same
question: what happens when ordinary people discover that the systems governing their lives are neither inevitable nor divine?
After years of readings, workshops, and commissions, I’m at the uncomfortable threshold where my musicals need to stop being perpetually “in development” and start meeting audiences. Two of my shows are having their first productions next year (Edinburgh Fringe and The Secret Theater in LIC). The Larson Grant would give me the financial freedom to prioritize writing over paid artistic freelancing. I want to make a career writing ambitious, unflinching musicals that actually get produced. I want them Off-Broadway, regionally, internationally, in Bushwick warehouses – wherever they can find life.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go inject some insulin and berate my insurance company. “
-Eddie Bean