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Wet Brain

In Another Universe

by Fiona Selmi
Essays in-another-universe

“Earth’s the right place for love:/ I don’t know where it's likely to go better.” - Robert Frost

I am no stranger to an Arizona summer. Dry heat is suffocating. Every movement feels jarring, labored, and daunting. It’s the kind of heat that makes you believe air conditioning is sent from God, and causes you to look at Phoenix and think,“who put so many strip malls in this desert wasteland, and decided to call it a city?” You want a lemonade or a margarita or a cold beer. You need an escape.

In John J. Caswell Jr.'s play Wet Brain, we meet Ricky, Ron, and Angelina in Scottsdale, Arizona. Ricky, a prodigal son of sorts, has returned home to help his siblings care for their ailing father, Joe, who is deep in late-stage alcoholism. They’ve all come together to figure out how to care for him, and inadvertently, how to care for one another as they try to let go of a family that was more often fucked up than nuturing, but a family nonetheless.

The siblings negotiate what will happen to their father once they cease to be his caretakers, and return to the lives they’ve abandoned for him. They wonder if leaving him to his own devices might be the easiest way out. And yet, they cannot fully let go of Joe for the simple fact that he is their father. Rather, they choose to follow him into his inner universe, one where the honest communication that they crave from him, that we all crave from our parents, can be given without the normal constraints of time, space, and physical embodiment.

Late one night, Ricky, Ron and Angelina, together, conjure and enter a kind of dormant consciousness: the liminal space of their childhood that they’ve long repressed. They move into another mental and emotional dimension in order to transgress the line which Joe’s alcoholism has drawn between him and them. This dimension is what performance theorist José Esteban Muñoz would call the “no longer conscious.”

“The no longer conscious is an essential route for the purpose of arriving at the not yet here.” Muñoz writes in his 2009 book, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, which is part performance theory, part manifesto, and part love letter to both the past and present of queerness. In Wet Brain, the three siblings make a choice to embrace their upbringing, their father, his decline, and all of the skeletons that their parents left behind.

If the siblings need to escape the here and now by embracing the “not yet here” – then they are seeking what Muñoz calls a utopia. They choose to take the skeletons out of their closet and make them dance.

Not a utopia like the Garden of Eden, which Frankfurt School thinker Ernest Bloch describes as an “idealist utopia” – but, rather, a “concrete utopia.” In his 1954 book, The Principle of Hope, Bloch defines “concrete utopias” as utopias that can be achieved in the present through a pragmatic project of hoping for a slightly different world, a slightly better world than the here and now. Bloch believed that concrete utopias were the most genuine of the form, writing “we need the most powerful telescope, that of polished utopian consciousness, in order to penetrate precisely the nearest nearness.” He believed that striving towards an incrementally better future, a possible future, is the most noble and courageous thing one could hope for.

Wet Brain is a play about the corporal, about something that is contained within you, the unavoidable that is pulsing through your bloodstream. The present is cluttered. And the trauma of Ricky, Ron and Angelina’s childhood is made even thornier by the trappings of theatrical realism.

And so when the characters of John’s play enter their own utopia, employing what Muñoz calls the “Utopian Performative,” we are asked to imagine a world: a future that shuns our everyday notions of time, space and embodiment. In the present, there are unmovable physiological boundaries that prevent Joe and his children from ever having the conversations they need to have. Wet Brain, in shaking the mortal coil of realism, dares to make these boundaries movable, to choose alternative definitions of time and space, to transgress universes.

And yet, we recognize that the bodies on stage are present in our reality. The extra-temporal plane on which the play operates is still bound by the very tangible limits of the time it takes an actor to walk back and forth across a stage. And so a kernel of possibility starts to creep in, giving us the smallest glimpse of a future in which we too can experience the understanding that Angelina, Ricky and Ron build a utopia to find. Maybe we can do it without the utopia, maybe the here and now is enough.

In many ways, this is a play about hope. A play about the impossibility of abandoning hope for your parents to be better, and the necessity of doing so. It is the letting go of an idealist utopia for a concrete one: the simple, daily practice of hoping for a better tomorrow.

In Wet Brain, the universe of a failed patriarch asks us to imagine what happens if we exchange one type of hope for another. Joe’s mind and body have failed him as a result of years of abuse; a hope for the person he was must be abandoned. And yet, Joe himself hopes that he can be better for the first 15 minutes of every day. There might be a sense of resolution hidden in this type of quotidian hope, a recognition of the here and now coupled with a belief in potential; of believing in the people your parents could be or once were. Or even who they never were, but a belief in the principle, that people, that our parents, can change. That they can become a version of themselves that they never were and never can be.

We will always fail in reaching that better future. We might even fail after the first 15 minutes of our days. We might not even make it to 15. And yet, the project of trying, of failing towards a better future –a better version of ourselves, a better idea of family – is worthwhile, it will always be worthwhile. We must find the courage to hope, to fail.

And like the temptation of a cold beer in the Arizona summer heat, hope can be intoxicating. It’s been said that one can get drunk on hope, on idealism, on the projection of a future that we will never see. We understand what it feels like to hope, to escape this universe, and yet, we choose to stay here. We choose to build a life, a future with the things we have and with the people we’re here for. We choose to believe in our people–and ourselves–even through the everyday impossibility of becoming who we want to be.

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