FLATTY
Yes, nuance, unless she’s careful, or a socialist feminist.
BIFF
Everyone hates you Flatty.
OTTOLINE
Oops.
FLATTY
(Unphased, not missing a beat) And then there will be no nuance at all.
ASPERA
Does everyone hate you?
FLATTY
No, they don’t.
ASPERA
I live in London now, I’m out of the loop.
FLATTY
They don’t hate me, they envy me my money.
ASPERA
(To Happy) I wouldn’t really beat you up.
FLATTY
I could buy and sell the lot of you. Even you Happy and you write sitcoms. There. I’ve said it. I am wealthy. My plays have made me wealthy. I am richer than essayists, novelists, at least the respectable ones, and all poets ever. Envy is rather like hatred but as it’s more debilitating to its votaries and votaresses (because it’s so inherently undignified) it’s of less danger ultimately to its targets.
BIFF
I don’t envy your money. I envy your reviews.
HAUTFLOTE
I think we should dig now and bury Ding. This ground is patrolled. The night doesn’t last forever. Ding’s waiting.
OTTOLINE
(Softly, firmly) Ding’s dead.
I love this place. It was worth two hundred and thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents to get here. Yes Flatty you can pay my way. Send me a check. Biff’s got a point. It’s the reviews, isn’t it. I’ve worked tirelessly for decades. Three at least. What I have done no one has ever done and no one does it nearly so well. But what I do is break the vessels because they never fit me right and I despise their elegance and I like the sound the breaking makes, it’s a new music. What I do is make mess apparent or make apparent messes, I cannot tell which myself I signal disenfranchisement, dysfunction, disinheritance well I am a black woman what do they expect it’s hard stuff but it’s life but I am perverse I do not want my stories straight up the narrative the narrative the miserable fucking narrative the universe is post-Cartesian post-Einsteinian it’s not at any rate what it’s post-to-be let’s throw some curve balls already who cares if they never cross the plate it’s hard too hard for folks to apprehend easy so I get no big money reviews and no box office and I’m broke, I’m fifty or sixty or maybe I’ve turned eighty, I collected the box at the Cafe Cinno yes I am THAT old, and poor but no matter, I have a great talent for poverty. Oblivion, on the other hand, scares me. Death. And this may shock you but (To Flatty) I ENVY you . . . your RENOWN. (Roaring) I DON’T WANT ANOTHER OBIE! I want a hit! I want to hit a home run! I WANT A MARQUEE! I’m too old to be ashamed of my hunger.
BIFF
O come to me short sweet (He blows a raspberry). There’s just no dignity. I am oppressed by theater critics.
FLATTY
I gave up on dignity years ago. I am prolific. That’s my revenge. If you want dignity you should marry a lighting designer.
OTTOLINE
Perhaps now we have worn out our terror, or at least winded it.
HAUTFLOTE
At darkest midnight December in the bleak midwinter athwart the crest of Abel’s Hill on Martha’s Vineyard six moderately inebriated playwrights stood shovels poised to inter—
FLATTY
Illegally.
HAUTFLOTE
. . . the earthly remains of a seventh.
HAPPY
Who might at least have agreed to the convenience of a cremation.
HAUTFLOTE
Being a creature of paper as well as of the fleeting moment Ding naturally had a horror of fire. I knew him best. For a long time now. I loved him.
OTTOLINE
We all did.
HAUTFLOTE
Yet not one of us dares break ground.
HAPPY
Wind perhaps, but never ground.
ASPERA
Wind for sure but not the Law. But is it the Law or what’s underground which immobilizes us? Incarceration or an excess of freedom? Enchainment or liberation? For who knows what dreams may come? Who knows what’s underneath? Who knows if anything is, if the shovel will strike stone, or pay dirt, or nothing whatsoever?
It’s the Nothing stopping me. I can speak only for myself.
FLATTY
Bad thing in a playwright.
BIFF
The horseleech hath two daughters. There’s a play in there, somewhere, of course. I used to say: it won’t come out. Fecal or something, expulsive metaphor. I was stuffed, full and withholding. In more generous times. Before the fear . . . of the Deficit, before the Balanced Budget became the final face of the Angel of the Apocalypse. Now instead I say: I’m not going to go there. A geographical metaphor. Why? I’m nearly forty is one explanation. “There” meaning . . . That bleachy bone land. Into that pit. That plot. To meet that deadline.
OTTOLINE
The play is due . . . ?
BIFF
Day after yesterday.
HAPPY
Rehearsals starting ... ?
BIFF
Started.
ASPERA
What, without a script?
BIFF
They’re improvising.
(Everyone shudders.)
FLATTY
You shouldn’t be here! You should be home writing!
BIFF
Did I mention how much I hate you, Flatty.
FLATTY
Marry a lighting designer. It worked for me. Sobered me right up.
HAPPY
I never meant . . . This reverse transcription thing. I’ll work on it.
ASPERA
You do that.
HAPPY
I never meant to equate Hebrew and . . . It’s just the words: reverse transcription. Thinking about it. Something I can’t help doing. Writing began with the effort to record speech. All writing is an attempt to fix intangibles—thought, speech, what the eye observes—fixed on clay tablets, in stone, on paper. Writers capture. We playwrights on the other hand write or rather “wright” to set these free again. Not inscribing, not de-scribing but . . . ex-scribing (?) . . . “W-R-I-G-H-T,” that archaism, because it’s something earlier we do, cruder, something one does with one’s mitts, one’s paws. To claw words up . . . !
(Happy falls to his knees besides Ding, and starts to dig with his hands.)
HAPPY
To startle words back into the air again, to . . . evanesce. It is . . . unwriting, to do it is to die, yes, but. A lively form of doom.
ASPERA
Ah, so now you are equating . . .
HAPPY
It’s not about equation. It’s about the transmutation of horror into meaning.
ASPERA
Doomed to fail.
HAPPY
Dirty work . . . (He shows his hands)
ASPERA
A mongrel business. This Un-earthing.
HAUTFLOTE
For which we Un-earthly are singularly fit. Now or never.
BIFF
I’m nearly forty. My back hurts.
FLATTY
Whose doesn’t? No dignity but in our labors.
(They hoist their shovels.)
Good night old Ding. Rest easy baby. And flights of self-dramatizing hypochondriacal hypersensitive self-pitying paroxys-mical angels saddlebag you off to sleep.
BIFF
(Apostrophizing Ding’s corpse) Oh Dog Weary.
HAUTFLOTE
Many of these graves are cenotaphs, you know, empty tombs, honorifics. Sailors lost on whalers, lost at sea, no body ever found, air and memory interred instead. All other headstones in the graveyard peristalithic to these few empty tombs, whose ghostly drama utterly overwhelms The Real.
(Hautflote waves his hand in the air, a downbeat. Ella Fitzgerald sings “Begin the Beguine.”)
OTTOLINE
Dig. Shove
l tips to earth.
(They are.)
OTTOLINE
The smell of earth will rise to meet us. Our nostrils fill with dark brown, roots’ ends, decomposing warmth and manufactory, earthworm action. The loam.
FLATTY
I don’t want to go to jail. Doesn’t David Mamet live around here somewhere?
OTTOLINE
Push in.
(They do.)
THE END
Hydriotaphia OR
The Death of Dr. Browne
An Epic Farce about Death
and Primitive Capital
Accumulation
This play is dedicated
to the memory of
Dr. Max Deutscher
1915–1980
scar-tough & skinless,
wrathful & wonderful . . .
Production History
Hydriotaphia or The Death of Doctor Browne received its first production in June 1987 at HOME for Contemporary Theater and Art in New York City. It was produced by Heat & Light Co., Inc. It was directed by the author and assisted directed by Michael Mayer. Lights were designed by Steven Rosen, costumes were by Priscilla Stampa, sets were by committee and exigency and Lesley Kushner. The music was by Mel Marvin. And the cast was as follows:
SIR THOMAS BROWNE Stephen Spinella
HIS SOUL Maria Makis
DAME DOROTHY BROWNE Roberta Levine
BABBO Priscilla Stampa
MACCABEE Peter Guttmacher
DR. EMIL SCHADENFREUDE Ümit Celebi
DR. LEVITICUS DOGWATER Lee Grober
LEONARD PUMPKIN Tim White
THE ABBESS OF X Alexandra Rambusch
DOÑA ESTRELITA Carmalita Fuentes
SARAH Cheryl Thornton
MARY Kimberly T. Flynn
RUTH Camryn Manheim
DEATH Sam Calandrino
Hydriotaphia or The Death of Doctor Browne was produced by the Graduate Acting Program of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in April 1997. The director was Michael Wilson; sets were designed by Michael Lapthorn, costumes were by Theresa Squire, the lighting design was by Lap-Chi Chu, sound design was by Darron L. West, the composer was Mel Marvin and the stage manager was Stacy P. Hughes. The cast was as follows:
SIR THOMAS BROWNE Jason Butler Harner
HIS SOUL Jeff Whitty
DAME DOROTHY BROWNE Anita Dashiell
BABBO Angel Desai
MACCABEE Christian Lincoln
DR. EMIL SCHADENFREUDE Matthew Miller
DR. LEVITICUS DOGWATER Sam Catlin
LEONARD PUMPKIN Tom Butler
THE ABBESS OF X Michael Hyatt
DOÑA ESTRELITA Teri Lamm
SARAH Christina Apathy
MARY Dionne Lea
RUTH Christopher Kelly
DEATH John Eddins
In 1998, Hydriotaphia or The Death of Dr. Browne received a co-production by the Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas (Gregory Boyd, Artistic Director; Paul R. Tetreault, Managing Director), and Berkeley Repertory Theatre in California (Tony Taccone, Artistic Director; Susan Medak, Managing Director). In April of that year the play opened at the Alley with Michael Wilson as director; Jeff Cowie was scenic and projection designer, David C. Woolard was costume designer, Michael Lincoln was the lighting designer, Joe Pino was sound designer, original music was composed by Mel Marvin and the stage manager was Kristin Fox. The cast was as follows:
SIR THOMAS BROWNE Jonathan Hadary
HIS SOUL Jenny Bacon
DAME DOROTHY BROWNE Shelley Williams
BABBO Bettye Fitzpatrick
MACCABEE Alex Allen Morris
DR. EMIL SCHADENFREUDE John Feltch
DR. LEVITICUS DOGWATER Charles Dean
LEONARD PUMPKIN Kyle Fabel
THE ABBESS OF X Sharon Lockwood
DOÑA ESTRELITA Annalee Jefferies
SARAH Delia MacDougall
MARY Moya Furlow
RUTH Louise Chegwidden
DEATH Paul Hope
In September 1998 the production moved to Berkeley Repertory Theatre (Tony Taccone, Artistic Director; Susan Medak, Managing Director). Michael Wilson was production supervisor, Ethan McSweeny was the director. Scenic and projection designer was Jeff Cowie, costumes were by David C. Woolard, lighting design was by Peter Maradudin, sound design was by Matthew Spiro, original music was composed by Mel Marvin, the production stage manager was Michael Suenkel and the stage manager was Juliet N. Pokorny. The cast was as follows:
SIR THOMAS BROWNE Jonathan Hadary
HIS SOUL Anika Noni Rose
DAME DOROTHY BROWNE Shelley Williams
BABBO Sloane Shelton
MACCABEE Rod Gnapp
DR. EMIL SCHADENFREUDE Charles Dean
DR. LEVITICUS DOGWATER J. R. Horne
LEONARD PUMPKIN Hamish Linklater
THE ABBESS OF X Sharon Lockwood
DOÑA ESTRELITA Wilma Bonet
SARAH Delia MacDougall
MARY Moya Furlow
RUTH Louise Chegwidden
DEATH Paul Hope
Thanks to Michael Mayer for waking the play from its long sleep, and to Zelda Fichandler for approving its first production in eleven years. Michael Wilson got it back on its feet and found its soul again. The NYU cast was magnificent, the Berkeley Rep cast was beyond heroic; the original cast performs the play nightly in my heart of hearts. I am very grateful to Stephen Spinella, Jason Butler Harner and Jonathan Hadary, my three Brownes, for their glorious incarnations of the nasty bloated logorrheic old bugger. The staff at Berkeley Rep saved my life, and are the Platonic ideal of a theater staff. Amy Potozkin and Susie Medak graciously endured a lot of anxious phumphing from me, and Michael Suenkel, the stage manager, made the impossible seem a routine matter of little regard.
More than anyone else, my deepest thanks, and much love, go to Tony Taccone, who has been over the years a great friend, in every regard a true gentleman of the theater, and a rare hand with a rubber chicken.
Sir Thomas Browne and the Restoration
The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the Aequinox? Every houre addes unto that current Arithmetique, which scarce stands one moment. And since death must be the Lucina of life, and even Pagans could doubt whether thus to live, were to dye. Since our longest Sunne sets at right decensions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness, and have our light in ashes. Since the brother of death daily haunts us with dying memento’s, and time that grows old it self, bids us hope no long duration: Diuturnity is a dream and a folly of expectation.
Darknesse and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest stroaks of affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables. Afflictions induce callosities, miseries are slippery, or fall like snow upon us, which notwithstanding is no unhappy stupidity. To be ignorant of evils to come, and forget-full of evils past, is a mercifull provision in nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil dayes, and our delivered senses not lapsing into cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of repetitions.
[from “Hydriotaphia or Urne-Buriall”
—SIR THOMAS BROWNE
SIR THOMAS BROWNE (1605-1682) was a writer of prodigious genius, coiner of an English-language prose style of such voluptuous baroquosity it melts the straight lines and right angles of the Euclidean universe, stretches every assumption of Cartesian logic, and achieves, by means of a remorselessly tortured syntax, something dialectically poised between Rigorous Reason and Ecstatic Delirium; aiming at science and philosophy, his essays achieve vision and poetry instead. Browne’s style influenced writers from De Quincey to Melville, and I believe his ornate jeweled swooniness can be discerned as influence in the works of such contemporaries as Michael Ondaatje an
d Edmund White.
Browne may have been a thoroughly lovely human being; this play is not intended as a portrait of the historical man, any more than it is an accurate portrait of late-mid-seventeenth-century England. If anything, this is a play about the treachery of words, about writing—probably it’s better that I let you decide what it’s about.
Primitive capital accumulation is a term of Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s, making reference to the ugly and vital process whereby a nation that is entering the capitalist phase of economic and social relations dislocates its rural populations in the course of a violent land grab by aristocratic and entrepreneurial classes intent on accumulating, by any means necessary, the material resources that provide the bases for mercantile, manufacturing and speculatory fortunes. From the devastation consequent upon such officially sanctioned piracy, an impoverished urban and factory workforce emerges, desperate for wages. Primitive capital accumulation is the nakedly brutal manner in which money was grubbed from people and land, before the camouflaging, cosmeticization, banalization and normalization of such mayhem, before we learned new words for it, like Modernization, Progress, Industrialization—before the invention of Spin.