Blank Space

Tolstoy famously wrote that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but I haven’t found that to be true. When I started graduate school I learned that nearly everyone in my playwriting program came from an unhappy family, and that playwrights were people who worked out the unhappiness of their unhappy families on the page, and that the unhappiness seemed to rhyme from one writer to another. There was a general helplessness I sensed from my cohort, a sense that we were impotent to help these broken relationships, a grim awareness that we had to surrender our need to communicate with people in our families and find our way back to them in imaginative conceits of plays.

Wet Brain is, in many ways, a play about impotence. Parents are impotent to help their floundering children; kids are impotent to help their dying father. Joe’s drinking has rendered him (to use Angelina’s phrase) “a bag of meat” — he’s completely incapacitated. Ron is sexually impotent, a problem that leads to the breakup of his relationship. Everything in this play is in some way sick, broken, corroded. (Caswell even compares the hallways of the family home to “fat-clogged arteries.”)

When Angelina insists upon the obvious, that Joe is way too sick to be left alone and needs Ricky’s help, Ricky demurs. “I’m gonna watch,” he replies, “we’re gonna see.” The coy reserve of Ricky’s “I’m gonna watch” perversely mirrors – and inverts – the traumatic wound at the center of the play, an event we learn about in exposition: that as a teenager, Ricky was assaulted (or “gay bashed” as Ron puts it) in Joe’s auto-body shop by mechanics, and that Joe and Ron simply stood by and watched it happen — maybe even condoned it.

If Joe looked on passively then, Ricky will now “watch” as his father spasms, collapses, pukes, bleeds — with an ambivalence that sometimes spills into outright hatred. “Should I kick him in the ribs?” he asks when Joe takes a spill on the kitchen floor. To be fair, none of Joe’s kids seem to like him very much. Angelina calls her father a “garbage can” and a “dirty fucking pig.” When a feeble Joe returns from a hospital visit, Ron sets the roughest setting on his massage chair to “crunch all that shit up.”

To be sure, Caswell milks jet black comedy from Joe’s condition. Early on in Wet Brain, Joe lumbers across the stage in a terrifying ski mask like Jason from Friday the 13th. The image is both absurd and frightening, and it highlights what we already know: that Joe is no longer human, no longer capable of betraying or helping or loving his kids, for he has made himself a cipher. Addiction hollows out its victims in this way, psychically and spiritually.

But was Joe ever really present for his kids? Is this zombified, wet-brain version of Joe any different from the man who stood by to watch his son’s jaw broken in a homophobic attack years earlier? Alcoholism has made Joe a kind of monster, but I don’t get the sense that there was some prelapsarian period for Ricky and his siblings. For me, Wet Brain is less about alcoholism than emptiness — the emptiness and vacancy at the core of broken families.

Flouting the homophobic taunts of his brother, Ricky proudly calls himself a “dirty fucking hole open 24/7”— and of course Ricky, his entire family, and the play itself, are all riddled with holes, emotional and spiritual, memories lost to drunken binges and alien abductions (real or imagined or maybe part of some other theatrical ontology that is neither), gaps in understanding, gaps in communication. “Why did you burn holes through your brain, Mr. Joe?” asks Mona, but anyone raised in an unhappy family knows the answer, knows that these gaps or holes become an organizing principle.

“Don’t talk about mom,” insists Ricky, because the trauma of her suicide must be buried. Trauma is a kind of hole, and people in this play attempt to escape it by burning new holes. Trauma is that which resists articulation, resists coherence and narrative; it lives in voids. If wet brain is Joe’s concrete diagnosis, trauma is the corollary.

Wet Brain is an attempt not to heal a trauma, but to depict it in a series of textures, images, coups de theâtre and jarring juxtapositions. Caswell doesn’t give us a release or catharsis in his play. The closest we get to real communication between the characters is not on this planet — which in itself is telling. It is equally telling that there may not even be any aliens where they are, just family — which for Caswell, and for many of us, is perhaps the most alien of all. 

David Adjmi’s plays have been produced at theaters around the world. He holds commissions from Playwrights Horizons, Yale Rep, Berkeley Rep, and the Royal Court (UK). His critically acclaimed memoir Lot Six was published by HarperCollins in 2020, and his collected plays are published by TCG. Upcoming at Playwrights Horizons: Stereophonic.