by Tony Kushner
BABBO
Hamen.
MACCABBEE
I wanna.
BABBO
Mordal sin. It bin a long, long day.
(They come together as lights go to black and . . .)
DA VERRA END
An Afterword
WHEN Hydriotaphia was in preparation at Berkeley Rep, with rehearsal time severely limited, I wrote a series of sketchy suggestions for Jonathan Hadary to consider while constructing his Browne. Jonathan greeted the pages I’d prepared with a wonderfully weary and slightly incredulous smile, accepting them graciously, promising to read them; actors know how to handle a control freak. I knew better than to ever ask if he had read them. A magnificent actor, Jonathan made Browne entirely his own.
It’s a tricky part, Dr. Browne is, and the entire extended farce relies very heavily, in terms of sustained tension and antic forward motion, on the performance of the title role. Publishing these notes is a risky and problematic decision. I don’t mean to suggest that there is only one way the good Doctor can be played. But the notes might be a useful guide for an actor or director who is beginning to think about the part, and perhaps non-actors and non-directors will find them illuminating vis-à-vis the performance aspects of the text.
Some General Thoughts about Browne:
Stephen Spinella, for whom the part of Browne was written, watched Bette Davis movies in preparation; one great queen learning from another, the waspishness and the wit. He even modeled his hair and makeup ever so subtly after Bette’s. For whatever it’s worth . . .
Heinrich Heine, the great nineteenth century German-Jewish poet, in horrific pain for eight years in his bed in Paris, was apparently all through his ordeal a dazzling conversationalist whose voice betrayed nothing of his torment, and even though he almost never slept he wrote over a thousand magnificent poems from his bed.
Browne’s a writer and he loves words.
He’s very very very afraid of dying, and of Death.
Everything internal he shares with his audience.
When others are onstage, if he wants them to be in the room he greedily engages with them. Otherwise, he tries various stratagems to expel them. He almost never ignores anyone. All his life he has been observing and watching and thinking about what he watches and observes.
He’s appalled by the way others treat him and the way they treat the fact of his incipient demise—from Babbo’s discussion of the funeral food to Dogwater’s carping about the Will, he is aghast. Their matter-of-fact acceptance, even in some cases their eagerness for his death, wounds and shocks him.
He has a good sense of humor.
His body has failed him but his mind is alert. There is rarely grogginess or weakness. His body is simply swollen, toxic, useless. The head is wide awake. What is killing him is his guts exploding.
He frequently turns on a dime, emotionally.
He never relaxes! He is active, his mind is working fast, even frantically, either to try to save himself, to distract himself from his terror and pain, or to meet his death head-on by shoving people away and facing being alone with his terror and pain.
None of these actions work—he is always returned to the fact he states at the top of the play: “I will die today.”
Act One
Browne wakes up, immediately wide awake, into terror, knowing that something frightening (Death’s first appearance) has just occurred.
He instantly calls for his comfort—Maccabbee—to ascertain if this morning is his birthday. It is—and he knows that he will die today.
The fear that realization engenders sets his busy mind to work. He wants to see the gravedigger—he wants to see the man who is fucking his wife.
The screaming at his wife makes his belly hurt, badly, for a moment. (“I shouldn’t scream, it brings on the bloating.”) Babbo’s questions about the food pull him out of the pain, her fondness for him (“. . . such a fussy ’n’ patricula man.”) calms him a little and he tells her about the dream he has had the previous night.
The dream is painted by him (the writer!) in quick sure simple strokes, a harsh little poem. I may be dying but I can still do this! And do it well!
This cheers him a little—enough to engage with her joke. (“There should be tears!”)
The quarry engines call to him. He loves them; he loves what he owns, what he has made, his world (“My engines!”)—and HE DOES NOT WANT TO DIE.
Schadenfreude comes in—Browne believes his leeches will help. The treatment almost kills him. He passes out.
While unconscious: he dreams that the gravedigger is screwing his wife. And then he dreams about moles. The moles are dark, beautiful, sexy and frightening. He dreams about the urn, also frightening, and inviting.
He wakes up: Dogwater’s yelling blasts him wide awake, instantly out of sleep and scrambling to locate himself—“Am I dead?”—and when he realizes (instantly!) that he’s still alive, he immediately assesses and deals with the menace of the moles; demanding of his wife that she fetch the gravedigger, he looks for the urn.
It annoys him that Dogwater is here, and that he’s intruding, he knows what Dogwater wants. He decides to torture Dogwater a little, pretending not to know him (he pretends successfully, we don’t need to know that it’s pretending), putting him in his place with his credentials (“I studied in Padua . . .”), and as always with his ability to dazzle with words (“Unearth the urn . . .”).
And as always the words take him to the truth—that he is going to die. And that he cannot face dying. (“It is impossible to CONCLUDE anything.”)
He abandons the game with Dogwater. It offends him that Dogwater is demanding a look at his Will. They don’t love him, the pastor only wants the money to be secured, and his wife is only interested in inheriting it and marrying the gravedigger. He decides to deny that he has written one. He wants to watch them writhe.
Having hooked them, he dismisses them.
He gives the Will to Babbo to hide, the only person he trusts.
His Soul, which has been noisily berating him more and more in the past week, demands that he let her go—that he die. He would like to believe that she is the best part of him and if he releases, if he dies, she will ascend and he will live in Eternity. But he is afraid to die, and like everyone else, she doesn’t love him, she only wants something from him; he decides to refuse her as well. He listens for his quarry engines, their love song to him, and he lets them lull him to sleep, escaping her demand.
While unconscious: asleep, he dreams of a timber ship. Someone is on the ship, though he cannot see who it is. The ship frightens him. He squirms a bit in fear.
He wakes up: Ruth’s “EARFEN CLOT” wakes him in two stages—eyes closed, he sits up, seeing the scary timber ship on the cold river.
His eyes pop open—he is wide awake. And alone. And scared. He calls for company—His Soul—let’s argue some more! But it’s gone. He is frightened by its disappearance. He tries to reassure himself by saying, as any rational person would, that it doesn’t exist: “Losing you is less than losing nothing . . .” To distract himself from the fear, to be alone no longer, he calls for the comforting presence of a manservant.
Browne orders the chicken experiment.
This begins as a distraction but he as usual is led by his mind to a search for the truth—that he really wants to know whether the soul exists, whether it has substance, as His Soul now seems to have. He is used to using Maccabbee to think these things through; Maccabbee makes him explain and that helps clarify—he has always known himself to be too impulsive and quick.
But he hears himself distracting himself (“You’re right. It is . . . nuts.”), and remembers what is REALLY frightening here—dying. (“Why is there no one here to comfort me?”) He is embarrassed that he’s reduced to asking this clod for company, revealing so much of himself . . .
So Browne sends Macc away.
But he’s lonely and frightened, he changes his mind, calls Maccabbee back. The moles
, the menace, do something about it, kill the bastards. (“A mixture of cyanide and boiling lye . . .”)
He hears himself again, and again angrily sends Maccabbee away, making sure as he leaves that he’s going to do the experiment (This sort of moment is what Estrelita is referring to when she says, “You are split in two . . .”), because Browne really needs to know . . .
AND HERE—he has a spasm of pain. He feels things giving inside. He tries to metaphoricize it (to control it): “The ropes on the dock are slipping from the moorings, and I’m . . . off . . .” ANOTHER SPASM OF PAIN—and he’s out.
A moment (Macc’s little speech: “Fetch da rottet birds . . .”) and he is suddenly jolted awake by a third SPASM which is so severe it knocks him out cold.
While unconscious (this corresponds to Death’s and the Abbess’s entrances toward the end of the Act): he dreams a terrible terrible dream. His dead father is in the room with a huge kitchen knife: when Browne was a child his father used it when drunk to menace his mother, and him.
He is so frightened by this vision that he decides to flee the room by letting His Soul go—by dying. (“Into your hands I . . . COMMEND MY . . .”) And there it is, eagerly awaiting his demise, which pisses him off, and frightens him; he changes “commend” into “condemn” and decides to wake up instead, and when he does, to his horror, confronts his dead sister (GASP!) and dead father! (GASP!) This cannot be (“NO!”).
And they go away.
He is now fully awake: Dorothy and Dogwater rush in. He asks if this can have been real. He’s sure he saw them. The sight of his father is by leagues the most terrifying thing he’s ever seen. In the midst of his terror, the ship returns as an image to him—but it’s a different ship, another ship, not the coffin ship, but . . . some vessel bringing love. He looks for and finds his quarry engines’ love song. Again, he lets them lull him to sleep, leaving a last little poem in the air, a talisman to protect him while he sleeps, protect him from terrible Father Dead.
While unconscious: he sleeps, dreaming of the ship, solace, protection.
Act Two
Browne begins to wake at Babbo’s, “DON’T DIE, DOCTAH . . .”
He has been dreaming of rescue, love, warmth on the timber ship. He feels happy calm and peaceful. Someone who loves him has come for him. He has been very cold and he asks for warmth, which he gets from her.
Then she leaves. (“The sun . . .”) He is cold again. He opens his eyes (“. . . clouds over . . .”).
And he wakes up into a nightmare—terrible Father Dead is back. He hides under the covers, completely abjectly terror-stricken.
It works! He is still terrified (“I cannot see that face again.”), but there was comfort for him in the room just a moment ago—a Spanish Lady . . . ?
His Soul is back, furious as ever; but Browne has just triumphed over Death (by hiding from him) and is determined to triumph over it too, denying its existence (“You’re not my soul, either, just some malcontented noisy thing . . .”), straining to shit out the tumor, and when he can’t do that—telling her that everything he has is his and his alone—he will not comply with its request—he won’t give up anything (“It’s all mine . . .”). Everything has been created by his desire and his intellect and none of it belongs to anyone else.
His Soul reminds him that the writing was a collaboration. He has considerable pride in what he has accomplished (“I recorded it for posterity!”), but His Soul reminds him how immensely beautiful and clean and pure and holy its song was, and he knows that what he wrote was none of those things: his words took him to places he didn’t anticipate, to a darkness andmeaninglessness at the center of existence, to a void.
That’s what is in the three ellipses, in Act One (“The baby in the . . . the genesis of things.”), here in Act Two (“When I described what I saw inside, the room had changed, it . . . was rather empty, and”) and in Act Four (“The battering complicatedness of living, it’s . . .”), it’s a very human place, where opposites coexist and overwhelm and intoxicate and affright—and for which no words exist—which is why this place, this ellipsis, draws him in and frightens him so . . . Browne can describe everything but he cannot describe that. It is a dark and bitter realization, a dark and bitter place, and the fact that he is actually rather fascinated by it makes it only worse, he feels ashamed, alarmed . . .
Browne feels he should be pitied rather than despised for this. (“Pity me! You should! The world made me, the word betrayed me, I never wanted to see . . .”)
So that when Maccabbee comes back in, Browne is in a very troubled place; he feels that he has failed God, who sent him this beautiful song, which he then smudged and besmirched, simply by being flawed, greedy, fearful—human.
He doesn’t want to deal with Maccabbee. At first he has no idea what Macc’s talking about, strangling chickens—and when he remembers the experiment it seems like a pathetic joke, incredibly ridiculous considering what he’s just realized, his failure, his shame. He wants this torment to end (“. . . let’s end this farce . . .”).
But as always when he arrives at Death’s doorstep, ready to face it, he finds he can’t. (“What were the results?”)
And Browne is alarmed to hear that the results are something unexpected—the unknown, the weirdness, that really scares him, really makes mock of his attempts to control this day. WHAT IS GOING ON HERE!? (“IT CANNOT CONCEIVABLY WEIGH MORE DEAD THAN . . .”)
This connects to what he says in Act Four, and it’s at the heart of the terror—(“It isn’t possible! I can’t conceive it!”)—that there is something in this dying business that he with all his intellect cannot control.
And then just as he is getting really frantic and scared, this death portent, the Weaver of Shrouds, appears, and in trying to get away from her, and this terrible fear, and this room, to physically get away, he causes something in his swollen gut to rip. He tries to deal with this physical crisis, and with the frightening weaver, and in the midst of all this Father Dead appears, and Browne curls away from him into a little ball at the uppermost corner of the bed—hiding worked once before, and he has to calm this fire in his gut—and calls/begs for the psalm. The psalm reassures him, he takes a peek and sees Death has gone . . .
The doctor arrives, unfortunately the wrong one.
During the prayers he takes inventory of his innards: he realizes that he has done some serious damage to himself and that as he said at the beginning of the day, he is, in fact, going to die, and soon. He is as he says “working on it.”
Dogwater comes at Browne demanding the Will. Browne doesn’t want to give it to him, he is frightened, he wants to live, he tries to get some distraction action going by talking about/railing against his children, attacking Dorothy, keeping Dogwater at bay—he makes a last stab at hanging on, roaring.
But as always his words lead him back to death, bitterness, regret. (“He used to send copies to me, but then he . . . stopped.”) Dorothy’s, “You got what you wanted,” is painful to hear. He is returned to the bad place—while the doctors fight and Dogwater storms off—and perhaps even Dogwater’s, “This is what comes of you irresponsibility,” gets to Browne. He makes a decision, the net result of all that has happened so far: he decides he is ready to end it.
This is a big change: though there will be moments when he thinks otherwise, from this point on for the rest of the play Browne is trying to face dying, he is trying to die.
He asks to go to the river, which he knows will finish him off—he makes the request first of Schadenfreude, then of Dorothy. Browne tries to get out of bed on his own power; unable to do that, he asks the weaver.
Even though this is his last request, as he says, even though he has resolved to go, no one will help.
Then help arrives. The woman from the ship. It is astonishing, a miracle, an unexpected occurrence that is for a change favorable, reassuring.
While she talks to Schadenfreude, Browne watches her closely and realizes who she is. It’s a private rea
lization, the audience doesn’t need to see it, but probably it comes here. By the time Browne asks her, “How did I know you were coming to me?” he knows who she is.
When he says, “How mysterious,” he is referring to her astonishing arrival at just this juncture. There is real grief and regret in, “I think now I never thought enough about love.” Here is a mystery Browne didn’t plumb deeply enough, and now it’s really too late.
And then he goes off to the river.
At the River: the washing is extremely lovely, though he is unconscious for most of it.
Act Three
Asleep while being bathed, dried, carried back from the river to the house: in his dream the moles have changed into something quite sexy and wonderful, full of mystery and delight.
He half-wakes: Dogwater’s yelling brings him up to the surface waking, and he tries to describe vast twisty enticing tunnels under the river, full of moles—and even half-awake Browne composes poems, this one about moles, their blindness seeming deep and full of powerful meaning—blind perhaps like a seer, or a prophet, tragic and yet deep diggers, like Browne himself, nosing through the earth for the truth.
There is groggy joy in making the poem.
Act Four
During the Rant: the lovely warmth and ease and caress of the bath is banished in the rant. All the things Browne regrets and is ashamed of, all his terror of dying is called forth in this nightmare, ending with a premonition of the hunger that comes after—this is when, during the rant, he cries.
He wakes up: Dorothy’s, “BABBO!” wakes him, and again he wakes into terror, alone.
After he tries to shit, he has a spasm—what ripped intestinely in Act Two is worsening. Browne realizes that he is in trouble, nearing the end.
The urn has arrived, a death portent, silent, still . . .
