When the Sleepers Awaken
by Anne Washburn
Werewolf is a game (you may also know it, if you know it, as Mafia) best played in a roomful of people who don’t know each other well, and are experiencing a social impulse, and it’s after dinner, and dark, and maybe there’s drinks or whatever. It’s endemic to writers’ colonies.
You sit in a circle by the fire, or around a table, and the game is led by The Narrator, who starts by passing out cards at random to establish the identity of every player. You cup the card in your palm to glance at it, and you are Townsfolk or The Doctor or The Seer or… The Werewolf.
There is, The Narrator informs everyone, a Monster loose in this small community; it selects its victims at night. Night has fallen. Everyone droops their heads, closes their eyes.
“And now,” says The Narrator, “Let The Werewolf awaken” (or, you know, to that effect) and in the circle of ‘sleepers’ — and remember that it’s night, and ideally the lights are low — one person opens their eyes — and there is a curious intimacy in that moment, between the Narrator and The Werewolf, two sets of live eyes in a circle of closed faces; a secret, and a threat — and The Werewolf silently, subtly, indicates a victim.
“It is done,” The Narrator might say, or “got it” or, perhaps more menacingly: nothing.
The Werewolf closes their eyes, and sinks back into the small sea of sleeping Townsfolk.
I like to think the impulse behind theater is that it strokes the set of nerve endings we acquired in our origins as humans sitting around campfires in the dark studying each other carefully: who here is dangerous, who here is sexy, who is capable, who is lying, what will happen next. We have a lot of instincts around watchfulness, around grappling with unpredictability, and it’s pleasurable to thrum them in safety.
There is also a Doctor who is awakened and, looking around the circle of suspended players, can make a guess and select one person to ‘cure’ — it can be themselves; there is a Seer who is awakened next and points to one person about whom they have a question; The Narrator gives them a thumbs up, or a thumbs down — and The Seer closes their eyes again, knowing more than they did before.
And then the sun rises, The Narrator announces, and (unless The Doctor has guessed correctly, in the dark reaches of the lonely night, and has healed the intended victim) there has been a death in this small hamlet. The name of the victim is announced (that person, maybe relieved, maybe disappointed, possibly slightly stung — because it’s never quite pleasant to be killed, even in proxy—pushes their chair back a bit, grabs their drink, and prepares to watch the rest of it all play out) and now — and this is the heart of the game—the townsfolk have to deal with a secret werewolf: accusations are leveled, sometimes at near random; the accused hotly defend themselves and generally turn to accuse another; expressions are closely scrutinized, protestations of innocence evaluated. In the end the town casts a vote on who must die.
It’s a simple and complex game in which people who don’t know each other well try to game each other out: some people are good at performing innocence, some innocents are bad at performing innocence, some people are good at guessing but bad at persuading everyone else and the reverse, some people are taking the game seriously and others are looking to mix it up.
Generally the werewolf survives to kill, and to kill again.
It’s like a play, in which the audience isn’t safe.
One thing I learned, when I was a member of the 2018 Working Farm cohort at SPACE on Ryder Farm (a beautiful and only slightly haunted artist and activism residency on an old farmstead in Putnam, NY) for various weeks over the course of the summer, is that you don’t want to be on the wrong side of Dave Harris in a game of Werewolf because he knows. Be you ever so cunning, he knows if you’re The Werewolf, he knows if you’re The Seer; he’s one jump ahead of everyone else. It isn’t just that he can tell when you’re lying, it’s that knowledge of what the hell is going on seems to flicker to life within him—be it psychical powers, preternaturalism, or a heightened degree of watchfulness/observation I don’t know; just don’t try to game out Dave Harris.
“Writing has a cost — and people will love you for paying it…So in this search for newness, in all this language and fear, what’s the cost that I’m paying in the work of each of my plays? And how will I contend with the reward?” Dave Harris says in an interview…
[This is an amazing question. I teach playwriting sometimes and when I teach will at some point ask the writers if they have Questions and this is a question I am always waiting for, which no one ever asks -- not, necessarily, because they aren’t wondering; they probably don’t think I have the Answer, I don’t have the Answer, I don’t know the costs I only know they’re there, always, matter doesn’t coalesce from nothing, and, rewards can be deadly. What, Dave Harris asks, are the particular costs paid by American Black writers speaking to a white audience; is there an American white appetite for American Black pain and when it comes to that question and that cost I’m just a consumer, wondering about that thirst and what is it, exactly, a dark rich mix of impulses, some of them very old and very deep, not all of them unwholesome; I can’t know the costs of supplying that nourishment, feeding that particular thirst; I can wonder about that hunger, and the consequences of that hunger, can wonder about what it means to give quarters for what satisfaction…]
We forget that theater is a form of near-infinite possibility and that we are living in a small corner of it. By “it” I mean the culture of theater as we understand it currently in, let’s say, the United States, and I include in this both the most familiar comfortable plays and the most insane experiments, but it’s worth remembering: just as Science is, properly speaking, not so much a set of conclusions (although it includes some pretty durable conclusions) as it is a mode of inquiry and rigorous curiosity, Theater is not the art of making a play, Theater (as a Western art, at least) is the form we use to grapple with the fact that we’re an inevitably social species which is positively larded with anti-social impulses, and there are a million ways to approach this. A play doesn’t have to push any sort of boundary to be very great and very satisfying, but surprise is a fundamental pleasure because on some deep level we’re always tensed for it.
I saw the first 10/15 minutes of Tambo & Bones at Ryder Farm, at the end of the season presentation of work from the summer. I liked it fine. I thought: oh, I know what this is.
Playwrights sent me a copy of this play and I began reading it, thought: yes I know what this is. And then realized I didn’t quite. And then that I really didn’t; I don’t remember the happy moment at which I realized I couldn’t figure out what would happen next or how; I couldn’t game out this play. This is in part because it’s a play in which pretty much anything could happen, because Dave Harris is taking us on a cruise through not exactly all but most of the possibilities, the thoughts and counter-thoughts, the feelings and counter-feelings, none of which cancels the other out but which accrue remorselessly. A play which is furious, cool, humane, diabolical, truthful, calculating, funny, stirring, featherlight, ultra dark, heavy, bright. A play which lands…beautifully…and what a pleasure it is when plays land beautifully…but which lands in such a way that you suspect if you stuck around after the end, when the audience has filed out, and the aisles are swept, the big red curtain will woosh back open and it will all take off again, going to the million other places it is capable of visiting.
Dave Harris is The Seer – the one who sees, sometimes all, and sometimes just more – he’s The Doctor – sometimes healing or trying to heal, sometimes rationing that power to protect himself – he’s The Werewolf: a killer – or maybe just hungry; he’s a Townsfolk, trying to figure out what is going on, trying to figure out what is the best way forward, trying to convince those around him of the truth both subtle and obvious through rational argument, through emotion, persuasion; he’s making and fielding false accusations, sometimes just mixing it up, one of an angry confused mob. And all along, of course, he’s The Narrator, pacing the perimeter of the circle, the one who sets it all into motion but cannot control the outcome, cannot intervene, cannot save anyone, powerful and powerless at the same time.
And he’s in the audience with us, both figuratively and actually, included and therefore unsafe.
[and here it might be worth flagging the very obvious; my gaze, multiplicitous in many ways, is also a very white one]
What have we bought for our quarters? 90 minutes inside the head of Dave Harris.
If you spend 90 minutes inside of Dave Harris’s incandescent head, will that give you the power to detect Werewolves or, if you are a Werewolf to thwart Townsfolk and Seers? Will it give you, earnest Townsperson that you are, the power to bring the people to your side? No.
Your personal powers have not increased but you’ve just spent some time with real Science, with a mindset which knows we have to offset our desire to see the world through the lens of what we understand and expect and hope and fear—the assumptions we’re most comfortable with—if we want to figure out what’s really going on.
Also: this isn’t Science, which is to say: it isn’t sentimental — doesn’t by temperament expect a rational outcome is possible—this is Theater and Theater, at its core, knows there’s no way to figure out what’s really going on; you can’t game out life.
