That Awful Inheritance: Thoughts on Generational Trauma

We are, all of us, unsolvable puzzles made up of chemicals and ghosts. The chemical part is difficult, but easier to wrap our minds around. We can research the medical history of our parents to see what diseases we might be susceptible to. We can cut back on drinking, or adopt a Mediterranean diet. We can get our doctors to prescribe us outside chemicals to change our inside chemicals to unburden us of our depression or panic attacks. We even can mail off a container of our spit to discover if we are at risk for heart disease, or find long lost relatives or, I assume, learn the exact day and hour of our death. 

The ghosts are trickier. They are the people, the memories, the feelings, and—perhaps most notably—the traumas that we carry with us each and every day. They can be our own, but often they are the traumas of our parents, our grandparents. The steady build-up of pain, hidden but always present, like layers upon layers of lead paint in a cheap apartment. We can try to rid ourselves of these ghosts, but often we don’t even know we’re haunted.

Now that I’m a father, I’ve been trying to identify some of my own ghosts. Some of them are close to the surface and fairly easy to identify, like being a socially awkward big kid in grade school, or a closeted gay teenager in a conservative religious school. Others are harder to locate. I’ve seen in my own family the ways that trauma can trickle down through the generations and make itself known in surprising ways. How does that live in me, in my marriage, in my parenting? Both of my grandfathers saw active combat in World War Two, and they both undoubtedly saw and experienced horrors beyond my understanding. How did that affect the way they raised my mother and father, and how does that shape the way I deal with my kid when she’s having a tantrum? My father was an emergency room physician in Lewiston, Idaho for four decades. He saw thousands of people either in the process of dying or already dead. Did that affect the way he raised me, and in turn affect the way I relate to my own kid? What about even further back, six generations ago, those Swedish homesteaders who left their country for good and brought their young kids to Idaho. Do they subtly shape the way I put my own kid to bed at night?

In that way, trauma is not a punch that produces a bruise which slowly fades with time. It’s a seed planted in a person that sometimes grows and sometimes withers, and is passed down from generation to generation. And this is the kind of messy, often frightening, in its own way beautiful trauma that John J. Caswell, Jr. is wrestling with in Wet Brain. It’s a play that, like life, resists easy answers or neat analysis. The play’s language is the language of pain, of hurtful love, and of complicated but necessary hope.

Writing the word “hope” just now, I stopped typing and stared at it for a while. It doesn’t feel entirely right, but there isn’t a proper synonym. It is hope, yes, but it’s a kind of hope that is equal parts longing and regret. That’s what makes John’s play so rewarding to unpack. The play is like a vast terrain that contains all kinds of geography—focusing on any one landscape feels like I’m not properly describing the whole.

In recent years, there’s been a certain trend—mostly within academia, at least as far as I can tell—of rejecting the so-called “trauma-based” play. After the last several years, it’s not hard to imagine where this is coming from. Our collective national misery has been so overwhelming and unrelenting lately that it’s reasonable to tack in the other direction in our art, to center joy and resist stories that derive drama and stakes from the agony of our characters. We’re all tired, we want relief.

But on the other end of that—what does that mean for our stories? Should they be about rich people becoming richer? Beautiful people becoming more beautiful? Happy people becoming happier? Should Wet Brain be a story about a family who—ugh, the vomit rises—overcomes?

More to the point maybe, who even are we without our trauma? Without these ghosts both experienced and inherited?

John has not given us a play that traffics in easy platitudes and obnoxious thesis statements about What We Ought To Think or What We Ought To Feel. It’s not a play where good triumphs over evil, or suffering leads ever-so-neatly to redemption. And, thank God, its characters don’t fall victim to those horrifying edicts that rule over so much modern writing which call for characters who do the “right” things and believe the “right” things, characters who we can easily align ourselves with morally, characters who are—here’s that vomit again—“likable.” John’s  characters live where we all live every moment of every day, in the gray. It’s a place where we aren’t always likable, where sometimes our suffering just sits there for a while, existing for its own sake. It’s a place where doing the right thing can be bafflingly complex and often overwhelming.

But in that gray, John offers us moments of love, humor, and hard-won grace. In one ritual of the play, Ron visits his non-verbal, severely alcoholic father in the morning to get him dressed for work, only to reassure him that he can call in sick that day. Ron is clearly doing it both for his father, but also for himself, planting a tent-pole of normalcy amidst daily chaos and agony. And deep into the play, the three siblings begin to actually have fun together for a time, but it’s done so with the help of the family scourge—booze.

Very late in the play, there’s a moment where Ron’s character says that the day before, his father drank one-half bottle of vodka less than usual. “I think he’s cutting back,” he happily reports. During the performance I attended, the audience member in front of me scoffed at this line in a quiet reprimand of the character on stage. I had an entirely different reaction. I wanted to rush the stage and wrap the character in my arms, for the way that he was finding tiny rays of light in the darkness, small words of encouragement for his father who likely doesn’t understand speech anymore. It was simultaneous care and destruction, and it both broke my heart and put it back together.

These moments, where deep hurt and deep joy live side-by-side, where we help each other by hurting each other, demonstrate what theater can do that so many other forms struggle with: to hold seemingly contradictory thoughts at the same time, and recognize that both can be true. Which is something we all could get better at nowadays.

This is the inherent beauty of John’s play. He is showing us real human beings, in all their painful, quotidian glory. And, toward the end, he does offer us an apotheosis of sorts, during which he introduces the thought that maybe—just maybe—we may all have the ability to bottle up some of our ghosts and shove them to the back of a cabinet. Even if—one day—we may open that cabinet back up and return to the drink.

Samuel D. Hunter’s plays include The Whale, A Bright New Boise, Pocatello, The Few, The Harvest, Lewiston/Clarkston, Greater Clements, and A Case for the Existence of God, among others. Originally from northern Idaho, he lives in NYC with his husband, daughter, and terrier mutt.