Notes on WET BRAIN
At least since Clytemnestra stabbed her husband Agamemnon in the bathtub – revenge for having sacrificed their daughter – western drama has fed on the torment of family life. But never so hungrily as it did in the theater of twentieth century America.
The American family play, as a form, has been so dominant on our stages that it’s become a default setting. A living room. At center, the sofa. Possibly an armchair. Upstage, a kitchen. Front door on one side, on the other a hallway leading to the rest of the house. Stairs leading to a second floor. A house, with one wall missing downstage: the petri dish of realism, where American life is scrutinized.
A strong, secure family life is at the heart of the American dream. So firmly does it live there that those who scream at us to make America great again point to the protection of family values as their core tenet; “family values” being the code for heteronormativity, temperance, patriarchy, religious faith and materialism. Trouble is, this domestic ideal is as much a myth as the American dream itself. Seeking to root out the anxiety, oppression and injustices of their time – as artists are wont to do – our nation’s playwrights peek behind the living room curtain.
Tennessee Williams, in a 1974 interview said, “I don’t think I would have been the poet I am without that anguished familial situation. I’ve yet to meet a writer of consequence who did not have a difficult familial background if you explored it.”
Family: a vortex of contradictions. It’s a source of both security and danger, simultaneously a safe haven and a war zone. It’s a collective body, which perpetually exists at odds with the individuality of its constituents. It’s an abstract idea, but one which is acutely present and inescapable. Even when a family no longer physically exists, it keeps a grip on you. And it’s an idea that’s tossed and turned by virtually all of the playwright-icons in American theater history: Williams, Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets, Lorraine Hansburry, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, August Wilson, David Henry Hwang, Maria Irene Fornes.
But maybe the most classic of the classic American Family plays, at least in the genre of realism, is Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical magnum opus, Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1941), which brought us the Tyrone family, caught in a net of addiction, moral degradation and, as critic Harold Bloom wrote, “the helplessness of family love to sustain, let alone heal, the wounds of marriage, of parenthood, and of sonship.”
The confinement of an onstage drama to a single location – a family home – is realism’s power. The space on view when at first the lights come up seems arbitrary, a random room. Then, gradually, it becomes loaded with meaning as it remains, relentlessly rigid, undeniable, a crucible for the inevitable clash of humans. The space becomes charged with energy, a tempest of heartbreaks, epic betrayals, dirty secrets – often let loose with the help of good old American alcoholism (a key feature of so many family plays). The play strains against the walls of its setting, in search of an exit where there is none. “Part of the wonder of a good realistic play is how skillfully it manages to charge such a small space with so much energy,” Bert O. States writes in his study of drama Great Reckonings in Little Rooms. “In short, what the realistic theater accomplishes, subliminally, is the imprisonment of the eye.”
In a living room in Arizona – a room saturated with memories and ghosts — John J. Caswell Jr.’s Wet Brain flutters in the continuum of the American family play. Behind the fourth wall, three siblings are chronically in battle, haunted by their parents’ self-annihilation; they’re trapped in it. It’s potent realism, a crucible growing unbearably hot. But Caswell draws from tradition only to break it. A traditional American family play encases its residents in the recycled air of its single interior location. The trauma and ghosts are indelible. (At the close of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, for example, the Tyrone family is left sitting in a hopeless drunken stupor, vibrating in the their mom’s chilling final line, “Then I married James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.”)
In Wet Brain, though, the house becomes increasingly permeable, its walls weak against this family's powerful need for escape, for liberation. Caswell's play draws them up, and farther up, away from the living room with the family sofa at center, the kitchen upstage, the armchair, the hallway leading to the rest of the house. It's breathtaking, this break into freedom — not just emotionally, as we get swept up in the love and yearning at war in the household — but because it seems as though the play itself is helping them there, and by extension, us.
When setting out to program a new season of plays, I never think of or aim for any unifying theme; I gravitate to each play individually for its urgency and craft. Often, though, in the course of producing a season, a common theme starts to emerge and surprise me. Wet Brain is the final play in Playwrights Horizons' 2022/23 season, a season which I've gradually come to understand has been a contemplation of the idea of "home."
The maze of identity crises in Mia Chung's Catch as Catch Can, our season opener, is sparked by Tim Phelan's homecoming, which unravels two households who formed an extended family. In Bruce Norris's Downstate, a thin-walled halfway house in southern Illinois becomes an inescapable prison for four post-incarceration sex offenders who are exiled from any sense of home. In The Trees, Agnes Borinsky moves home entirely outside to a park outside dad's house, imagining an entirely new paradigm. And Julia Izumi's Regretfully, So the Birds Are follows three adopted Asian-American siblings all over the world, and into the sky, on their search for a home — or at least, for something to fill its absence.
I haven't any brilliant take on what this means. Likely, this thematic confluence is just an interesting accident. But it has got me thinking about our relationship with home in the year 2023, in the aftermath of the Covid Era when, for a time, home was our world. How are we changed, or changing? And I think of a note from Arthur Miller, from a 1956 essay published in The Atlantic: "Now I should like to make the bald statement that all plays we call great, let alone those we call serious," he wrote, "are ultimately involved with some aspect of a single problem. It is this: How may [one] make of the outside world a home? How and in what ways must [one] struggle, what must [one] strive to change and overcome within [oneself] and outside [oneself] if [one] is to find the safety, the surroundings of love, the ease of soul, the sense of identity and honor which, evidently, all [people] have connected in their memories with the idea of family?"
I'm grateful for the chance to share John J. Caswell, Jr.’s Wet Brain with New York, in the company of an extraordinary creative team and in partnership with our friends at MCC Theater. It's a new, utterly original take on the perils of coming home, staying home, and leaving home — and by extension, it offers a possible frame for our lives in the new America. In imagining a new end to the dramaturgical trope of the living room play, it opens potential in our own lives.
