Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

(I had also become a bit of an alcoholic, if that’s the right word for someone who drinks not just for fun but also to stave off anxiety, shame, and terror. That’s partially why I’m on such experientially intimate terms with feelings of bucking, stomach-clutching, holding back vomit, trying not to picture my insides corroding like steaming green acid eating through metal. I had begun to drink furtively in the daytime before drinking openly in the nighttime. I bought whiskey or vodka and kept it in a little canteen in my coat pocket. I would just drink a little bit, steadily, all day long, enough to keep me consistently hooked up to a slight buzz, every sip I took like throwing meat to the wolf at the door. I would dwell on this in greater detail if only it were more interesting.)

As a result of my not having paid much attention to the business end of the Shakespeare Underground’s production of The Tempest , to this day I remain not entirely sure how our audience found out about us — much less how they found out when and where the production was being staged, and so on — but find out these things they did. In thematic keeping with the name of our company, the Shakespeare Underground undertook its promotions and ticket sales in the same spirit as we began, and in which we committed all our operations: virally, secretly, in a mode of dubious legality, operating like an underground resistance movement. “Resistance to what?” you may ask. And Leon and I would answer: “Resistance to everything!” Resistance to a nation preoccupied with useless ephemera! Resistance to the slow incoming creep of the twenty-first century, resistance to that invisible poisonous gas that has been hissing up into the air from every crack and fissure in the street, which Leon taught me to smell. It is admittedly a vague thing, an invisible thing, a nebulously hard-to-define thing, but Leon and I knew it was everywhere, and that it needed to be resisted. It’s still there. I can smell it, Gwen. It’s stronger than ever, in fact. It’s right here in this room. I can smell it even in here, even in the safety and sanity of this research center, even in the tidy environs of science, far away from human society, in captivity, in a tightly secured building nestled in a remote wooded area in rural Georgia, where the stars come out at night and the birds sing their songs in the day: even here I can smell it. Don’t let your nose get used to it. When you are out walking on the street, going about your business, a part of your soul must always be crushing a handkerchief to your face.

But as I said, I funneled my energies totally into developing my Caliban. I hope that the future’s scholars of dramaturgy (if indeed such people will exist in the future) will recognize that I, Bruno Littlemore, was the first actor to realize that the role of Caliban should be played through an evolutionary perspective. While I understand The Tempest was first performed in 1612, a good two and a half centuries before the publications of Charles Darwin, on closely studying the text, I find it hard to believe that Shakespeare was not in some way anachronistically informed and even influenced by The Origin of Species . Time perhaps is not as uninterestingly linear as we imagine, Gwen. Shakespeare was at the very least a clear premonition of his future fellow Englishman. I even go so far as to imagine that the ship in The Tempest is the Beagle , and Prospero’s island, Galapagos. Examine the following, from the scene in which the drunken jester, Trinculo, discovers Caliban lying inert on the beach:

What have we here? A man or a fish? Dead or alive? A fish! He smells like a fish; a very ancient and fishlike smell…. A strange fish! Were I in England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver. There would this monster make a man; any strange beast there makes a man…. Legged like a man! And his fins like arms! Warm, o’ my troth! I do now let loose my opinion, hold it no longer. This is no fish, but an islander.

“A very ancient and fishlike smell”—! The Darwinian undertones are clear to me. What Trinculo describes, upon seeing Caliban lying still and wet on the muddy beach, amounts to a description of evolution in fast-forward. He begins as a fish, smelling very ancient and fishlike, freshly crawled up onto the beach to leave a life in the oceans, and then becomes a monster, a strange beast — and then he grows legs, and his fins become arms! Finally, he abandons his cold blood for warm, and becomes a mammal, an islander: the monster is made man.

Shakespeare and Darwin, Darwin and Shakespeare. Darwin, Shakespeare; Shakespeare, Darwin. These two Englishmen, these two great minds, these two great thinkers, are obviously connected. They are braided together in some golden harmonious collusion between science and art, between biology and theatre. The one probably could not exist without the other. All theatre is biology, and it logically follows that all biology is theatre; this is what’s meant by “All the world’s a stage.” Shakespeare, Darwin; Darwin, Shakespeare. Theatre is biology, and biology is theatre.

Maybe pamphlets were distributed to pedestrians on the streets, maybe posters were pasted on walls to advertise the play, maybe there was a viral campaign, and talk of us spread in waves of excited furtive whispering across the campuses of colleges and universities. However the people in charge of publicity chose to do it, I’m sure they did it in such a way, as Leon had thoroughly drilled them on how to behave in accordance with the true spirit of the Shakespeare Underground: it was cultural guerilla war, an underground political resistance movement — keep it secret, dangerous, subversive, conspiratorial. Somehow, people found out about us, and they found us, and they came. People arrived from out of state to see the play, some of them, I am told and I believe, coming from far-flung locations many miles away. Young and old alike, they came. Our audience found Mr. Locksmith’s locksmith’s shop, squirreled away in a drably nondescript brown brick building on a ubiquitous-looking side street on the Lower East Side. His workshop now doubling as a ticket booth, the frail, confused, and elderly Mr. Locksmith took the tickets, wearing his green visor, as his fat black-and-white cat lazed on the countertop, her tail switching like a metronome. Ushers guided the people down the hallway of the locksmith’s shop and past the bathroom — advising them to use it now or hold their pee until the end of the show — and to the elevator, where another usher/elevator operator took them down below in groups of five or six. When they clunked to the bottom of the elevator shaft, deep below the surface of the earth, the usher accordioned back the shrieking brass lattice to let them out, and the people stepped out of the elevator, where they were abandoned. The people would then feel and grope their way through several layers of thick black curtains and into a profound darkness. At first the darkness is so complete that they cannot tell if their eyes are closed or open or if they have eyes to open at all. Here they become disoriented, as if they have all been blindfolded and spun around in dizzying circles. Here the audience members enter dreamtime, are sucked back into the womb, or into outer space, or inner consciousness, into the darkness of their own brains, so that they cannot really be sure — even though they know they have entered the building consciously, perfectly alert, and of their own free will — whether they are awake or dreaming. After exiting the elevator into the performance space, the audience members are free to wander at will. Soon their eyes adjust to the low lighting, and they perceive that they are not in total darkness, but that the room is lit by very dully glowing red lights here and there — just enough lighting to give the illusion that the room is lit without allowing anyone to see exactly where they are, or even who is standing near them. The people bump into each other, they put their hands in front of them to feel the contours of their environment. They speak out to each other in the dark, make attempts at conversation, only to realize that the people who stand near them now are not the friends or loved ones in whose company they entered the building; they are perfect strangers. The room bubbles into a cacophony of voices calling out in the dark to lost friends, and the lost friends only sometimes call back, confused, disoriented. But no one ever finds who they are looking for. The room becomes a swirling gale of separated lovers and parted friends. The audience members also gradually come to realize that there are no seats and no stage. There are no designated places for anyone to sit or stand, nowhere to hang their coats, and no clear place for them to look toward. This is because the entire room functions as both audience and stage. Now beneath their feet, they feel a ground that is not hard, but soft and pliant, which gives beneath their shoes. Some of them bend down to feel the floor beneath them, and their fingers touch sand. Some of them pick up fistfuls of sand that they let sift out between loosely closed fingers. The floor is covered in so much sand that they cannot feel any flatness underneath it, the texture of the floor feels exactly like a beach. That’s because it is a beach. Some people sit down in the sand. Some take off their shoes and socks, and dig their feet into the beach to feel the cool silky sand slithering between their bare toes. As they begin to spread out and wander around the room, some of them discover water. For there is water — real water — lapping at the edge of the sand. They kneel down to feel it with their fingers, or the ones who have taken off their shoes and socks dabble their toes in it, or they hike up skirts and roll up pant legs to go splash around in it. Yes, it is real, and not some elaborate illusion. What’s more, it is saltwater. The whole room smells like the sea — although the audience has by now forgotten that they are in a room at all. The water spills onto the beach and draws back again in authentic waves. The quivering globs of jellyfish that have washed ashore lay scattered about the beach, and a few crabs click and scuttle in and out of the foaming surf. The people call out across the water, and they do not hear any echoes. They are answered only by the crash and roar of the open ocean, stretching far out into the indiscernible distance. Look! — they say to one another, strangers turning to strangers, pointing and whispering in voices hushed with bewitchment— look! — there’s the moon, rising above the water. Is it a cardboard cutout moon, hoisted up on fiberglass wires by an unseen crane? Is it a light projection on a wall, issuing from some hidden lens? It is so real-looking that it hardly matters whether it is real or illusory, for the effect is the same. Even if it is a false moon, it looks real enough to render the question of its realness irrelevant to the senses. The people look around them and, their eyes now aided by the moonlight, they perceive a jungle all around them. A wildly overgrown tropical jungle, resplendent with palm trees, with strange bushes exploding with bright flowers and dripping with vines, exotically shaped trees whose branches droop low with alien fruit, some of which the braver people reach out and pluck, and take bites out of, and find delicious, though it tastes like no earthly fruit they have ever experienced. The people run their hands over the leaves and stalks and trunks of the plants and the trees, and their fingers are shocked to be met not with the brittle dryness of plastic leaves or fabric petals, but with the unmistakably authentic fat wet honest kisses of vegetative life. They smell the flowers, they rip handfuls of leaves from the trees, astonished that it is all real. The air is steamy and hot. People take off their coats and jackets and hang them on tree branches. They look up: stars. Stars! Stars! STARS! Some ingenious artist has populated the ceiling’s firmament with thousands of glittering lights, again so perfectly mimicking nature that it hardly matters whether or not it is artifice: above them is the night sky of some unknown mythopoetic landscape. Tropical birds croak and whistle in the trees. Frogs hop, insects zither around their heads. When the play begins, the room is crowded, but it is impossible for anyone to tell how many people are there, or even where the boundaries of the interior space lie. Interior has become exterior to them. The atmosphere is equally as thick with enchantment as with fear. Now a strange and solemn music begins to play. The orchestra is nowhere and everywhere at once. Unseen cellos murmur like a swarm of bees; the violins shiver against the thrumbling tattoo of the timpanis. The music is dark and quiet at first, halfway between audible sound and pure naked feeling. Some of the people feel strangely warmed by the music and others feel chilled. The music does not emanate from any discernible source or direction. It is everywhere, it permeates the jungle and the ocean and the stars and the darknesses between them. The music somehow comes from inside the leaves of the trees, from inside the snakes and frogs that slither and hop at the people’s feet, and from inside the blood moving inside their own brains. The isle is full of noises, sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. A thousand twangling instruments hum about their ears. A soft crack-and-rumble of thunder in the distance. Now fast-moving black clouds smother over the stars, and the sky turns black. The people stand on the beach by the sea, or further inland, on the grass that is a green as deep as an emerald and feels fat with water under their bare feet, and they look up, and they watch the sky. Those stars and that moon, which only moments before they were amazed to see, are now obscured by thunderclouds speeding across the sky. The clouds are like paint poured into water. The clouds move fast but at the moment the wind is calm down here on the ground. The silence and stillness below the scope of heaven seems to portend some coming meteorological violence. The temperature drops. People hug their jackets to their bodies and brace themselves for the storm. The frayed leaves of the creaking palm trees are hardly moving at all. The palm fronds click together with an only barely kinetic languid floating in the tropical air. The snotgreen sea slops and laps as if it is asleep and its body is moving only in response to dreams. But up above, the silent sky is a snake pit, writhing with black and green muscles of vapor that coil around one another, strangle one another. The clouds look as though they are made of solid matter, not gas. The clouds race in over our heads. Their bellies sag with water. A flash of lightning asks a question of the clouds, three heartbeats of silence follow, and the thunder answers. What does the thunder say? Another blast of lightning spreads out its veins and disappears, quickly trailed by its dawdling wake of thunder. The moon lights up the clouds from above and behind them, making them glow palely in the spot where the moon is. Sometimes the clouds tear apart for long enough to show a flash of the moon’s whiteness. Now the sea beyond the beach begins to churn. The people standing on the beach look out across the water. They watch the water slap and splash with greater and greater violence. Rain whips down on us from the sky. It’s just a needly spray at first. The air is mist. Raindrops patter on leaves. The people are getting wet. Some of them take cover under the fronds of palm trees. Some of them hitch their jackets up over their heads. Some of them simply let themselves get wet. Women smear away running makeup with their fingers and push soaked hair back from their faces. The rain is warm. It’s a monsoon rain. The rain builds in intensity until there is a lull in its flow that everyone can feel, a quieting of its noise and a tangible drop in barometric pressure, the unmistakable moment right before drizzle becomes deluge, and it does, and now the rain comes thudding down on our heads hard and fast, pelting the beach’s sand with fat crater-leaving splats of water, weighing down flowers and the leaves of the trees, bending branches, drenching everyone to the skin. The people begin to peel off their wet clothes. An erotic charge in the air joins the electric. The people leave their clothes slopped in wet piles on the sand. The people shiver and shake, and lie down naked in the sand. Now the wind blows the rain sideways and pushes the limber-trunked palm trees flat against the earth. People cling to trees, to rocks, to each other. Who knows what sacred oaths are signed or broken in sweat and flesh and seed and soil on this night, in that storm, in the dark, on the beach in the briny tide or secreted in bushes, under trees or in mossy hiding places among the rocks? Although the steam and fog and the rain that lashes the earth with thick ropes of water all collaborate to foreshorten our visibility to what seems little more generous a distance than is measurable by an arm outstretched before a face, a ship has been spotted out at sea. A huge ship, a man-o’-war, it’s like a floating wooden castle. Its ripped sails flutter helplessly behind it. The ship rollicks in the waves and wind, tossed about as easily as a toy boat in a bathtub. Its sides creak and groan with strain, every element of its architecture cracking and splintering, threatening to snap in a hundred places. The ship is singed with St. Elmo’s fire. The deck, the bowsprit, the ropes and masts tingle with flame; shivers of electricity run all over every surface of the ship. The deck’s a scramble of frenzied activity. The sailors jettison things overboard, casks and barrels and crates. They yank at the ropes and pulleys and wheels, they run and slip and fall on the deck, clamber to their feet, slip and fall again. We watch from the shore as the sailors aboard the ship begin to dive off the deck into the water. The rain crashes down with renewed ferocity, then slowly starts to deliquesce. The wind softens a little. The sailors who jumped off the deck of the ship begin to struggle ashore. One by one they wash up on the beach, half-dead with exhaustion from their desperate dives and swims to safety. Their fingers claw at the sand. They stumble toward land, their boots slogging through the knee-high water. They crawl ashore, spitting out mouthfuls of saltwater, chests heaving, clothes sopping, and collapse on the beach. Crabs skitter around their bodies. A foamy film of tide licks at their feet, receding, returning, receding. The storm clears. The rain slows to a dribble, and then a patter, and then we cannot tell if it is still raining or if all we are hearing is water dripping to the ground from the puddles collected in the recesses of leaves and the funnels of flowers. The light changes: the stars disappear, though the sky does not brighten much. The quality of light in the sky is a deep muddy red underpainted with green and gold. The sky is not cloudy, but thick with mist. It is like a dawn on another planet, as if we are seeing the sunrise of another star, in another galaxy, on a world where an atmosphere composed of alien elements causes luminiferous effects unfamiliar to our eyes. The light is not bright, but it is light enough for the people to see around them. The birds in the trees begin to sing strange songs. The people look at the birds and do not recognize them, for they are not earth birds. These birds look half-dinosaur. Even the smattering of bird-watchers and ornithologists who happen to be in the audience are baffled by these birds, who seem to fall into unreal or unknown taxonomic slots falling perhaps somewhere between the cockatoo and the pterodactyl. The plants here are unrecognizable, too. The botanists who happen to be in the audience are amazed and even frightened, for they do not recognize them. Maybe they are prehistoric plants. They are plants with softly undulating slime-coated prehensile fingers, snapping carnivorous mouths, sensory appendages that seem to see and hear as distinctly as our own eyes and ears. These vegetables are almost animal in the immediacy of their movements, their quick responses to external stimuli, the strange emotiveness of their rooted bodies. We are in the valley of the uncanny. Some change has happened to the people’s minds, too. They are thinking like children. The forest smells thick and wild and sweet — full of blood, milk, fire, liquor, sap. The air is wet and heavy. The plants, the water, the rocks: everything surges and breathes with an inner intelligence, a kind of half-sentient consciousness, everything is internally animated with spirits. Like the world to a child, everything is alive. The people forget the bedraggled figures who struggled half-drowned onto the beach the night before. Some people simply choose to wander around the island as curiously and aimlessly as if they themselves have just been shipwrecked. Their clothes — the nice coats and dresses and shirts and ties and scarves that they had worn to the performance, to the theatre, only last night — these clothes cling limply to their bodies, damp from the storm, already ripped and spattered with mud. Still, no one can find the people they had come in with. The people wander the beaches hand in hand with the perfect strangers that they had made love to in the bushes or under trees during the storm. Some of them are still curled up on cushions of matted grass, still naked and asleep. Some people walk along the perimeter of the island, carrying their shoes in their hands to feel the tide lap at their bare feet. People look into the sky, trying to determine a light source, trying to estimate by the position of the sun which directions are east, west, north, south — but failing, because the sun is too vaguely defined, the light too broadly diffuse across the red-green-gold sky to determine the directions of the compass. Some of the braver ones choose to explore the interior of the island: these ones almost immediately become hopelessly lost. These ones see — or they think that they see — the tip of a small mountain or hill in the distance, peeking above the treetops, and so they push through the jungle, shredding their clothes on thorny vines, smacking mosquitoes on their arms, trying to reach the higher ground, hoping to reach a point from which they can look out and see the full lay of the land. Those who decide to push their way inland into the forest will never reach the mountain, and those who decide to walk along the shoreline will never circumnavigate the island, will never connect their loop of footprints. This is because the geography of Prospero’s island expands with the consciousnesses of its explorers. The act of exploration itself causes the space to grow. The island is potentially infinite. For those who have chosen to stay behind, the play begins. Only it is so real that it hardly feels like a play. The people hover around Miranda and Prospero in the dark jungle. The light focuses on Miranda and Prospero, everyone else is standing in darkness. They have become invisible. They are only ears and eyes. They have no bodies; they take up no space. They are like mathematical points, without volume, area, or any other dimensional analog. They are like spirits, observing invisibly. They have become what anthropologists only wish they could be. I am Caliban. When Prospero shouts— What, ho! Slave! Caliban! Thou earth, thou! Speak! — I come toward them, pushing past the people who are like elements of the forest to us actors, shoving them out of my way. The sticks and grasses snap beneath my plodding monster feet. I step into the light: hunched, grunting, limping under the weight of the bundle of sticks on my shoulders. There’s wood enough within, I growl. Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself upon thy wicked dam, come forth! When I step into the light, the people gasp. In horror? In disgust? Some of them look away. Others stare at me in perverse fixation. As wicked dew as ever my mother brushed with raven’s feather from unwholesome fen drop on you both! A southwest blow on ye and blister you all over! I am filth. I am a monster. I am a thing of darkness. I am naked except for a tattered loincloth clinging to my crotch. I am bent in half beneath my load of sticks. My flesh is covered with mud. I am half-human. Yet with soul enough to speak. I am a thing of lust and rage. I hate them. I hate Prospero. I hate them both. They have taken my birthright from me and put me to work. This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother, which thou takest from me. I hate all humanity. Nothing but fear and rage and hate comes out of my mouth when I speak, except for sometimes when I speak the most beautiful poetry in the play. I throw down the bundle of sticks. When thou cam’st first, thou strok’st me and made much of me, wouldst give me water with berries in it, and teach me how to name the bigger light, and how the less, that burn by day and night…. You taught me language, and my profit on it is, I know how to curse. And so it goes. Ariel flies above our heads, fades in and out of visibility. Ferdinand grunts under labor, Miranda loves him. Antonio plots, Gonzalo philosophizes, I get drunk with Trinculo and Stephano, I try to make them kill Prospero and steal his books. Spirits flutter in and out of our heads and make us say things we do not want to say. The audience disappears into the play. It is not really a play. The play is not something the audience is watching so much as something they are experiencing. The play is not confined to a stage or even a linear series of scenes following scenes and acts following acts, but rather, everything happens all at once. We disobey all rules of time and space. Everyone leaves his or her body and becomes raw floating consciousness. The play exists all at one time in the same way a book exists all at once. The object and the narrative cannot be disentangled. The play existed in a collective space of thought and feeling and dream and the world became a fog of impressions that night, of timeless immediacy, of magic and sex and fear and laughter coming together into a many-headed dream, a many-minded dream, like a dream being dreamed by the Hydra, and we had all changed our minds and had the minds of animals.