Playwright’s Perspective: Wet Brain
From the playwright: John J. Caswell, Jr.
Dear Dad,
If you're here and reading this note on 42nd Street, I would imagine we’ve already reconnected and discussed what you’re about to see. Although it’s way more likely you’re reading this note in the program I’ve sent you along with a copy of the script. That's more our style.
I won't hold it against you if you decide not to read it. I mean I’m the one sticking pens inside of my eyes for a living. It doesn’t mean I have any expectation you’d want to be a part of what comes oozing out. Sometimes I don’t want to be a part of it either.
Here, let's start with history.
It’s 2017 and I receive an update on your health. These phone calls are becoming more frequent. The news isn’t great, but it’s not dire and I have a lot of work to do. I’m sure you understand.
A few days later and I’m sitting in a cabin at a writing retreat unable to move on the project I had been planning for months. I’m isolating. I’m missing communal meals. I’m walking through woods in the dark in the middle of the night. I’m randomly sobbing. I’m suddenly an addict again in the throes of all the self-destructive behaviors that come along with it. But I’m not using. I’m completely sober.
Desperate to salvage my work and tear myself away from a badly-timed breakdown, I open a new document called DAD. I assemble our immediate family for a meeting in my mind’s eye and I begin to write something disgusting. We’re crying. There’s snot everywhere. We’re way too articulate and easily find the things that need to be said when really we have no idea how to string words together that mean comfort and progress. At least not yet.
Anyway, the writing retreat felt like a bust and I considered the attempt a sort of therapy. I put the whining thing away in a drawer on my computer’s desktop. Who needs another sentimental family drama crying over an insidious yet all-too-common disease? O’Neill already did the damn thing anyway.
Thanksgiving a few years later. A hospital room. You were pretty out of it. To be expected because they had you on a lot of stuff. You said some things to me. Some of it made sense, some didn’t. Something about a light you couldn’t turn off.
I walked away that night thinking about the expansiveness of your inner life. I reminded myself that the world, as perceived by the diseased mind, often defies logic. And that maybe a defiance of logic is what might finally allow us to make some sense of this. And of us.
So I got the play back out and this is where I ended up.
You should also know that the characters in this play are not actually us anymore. Even though they are, sort of. You’ll see flashes of yourself up there, it’s inevitable, but it’s not you. And don’t be worried about anyone knowing your business. I made up tons of fake shit to go alongside bits and pieces of our own story. They’ll never find us out. Besides, you'll remember exactly what's real and what's not, right?
Okay, last thing. From my own personal experience addiction shrinks universes and worlds. It makes us very small people living in very small spaces with no way to turn ourselves around. We can't view ourselves from a perspective that might actually break us free from the cell. I think of this play as an explosive munition, one that might obliterate the rigid and unimaginative thinking which prevents recovery and closure.
It's about to start. Maybe we can get into it more later.
With love,
Your Son.
