Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

“She’s fifteen.”

“Aha! Convenient. That is the age of Miranda in the play.” Leon quoted: “ ‘Canst thou remember a time before we came unto this cell? I do not think thou canst, for then thou wast not out three years old, and twelve year since, thy father was the duke of Milan and a prince of power.’ ”

Leon let me fondle the check and read it over and over on the way home. This was to be our production budget. The next morning we went straightaway to the bank to cash the check before any second thoughts could come to a more sober Mrs. Goyette. The first thing we bought with the money was a sturdy metal box with a combination roll that released its snaplocking clasps, in which we dumped all the crisp, never-been-circulated one-hundred-dollar bills that Leon and I had summoned from their beds of rest in the bank teller’s register, to introduce them into the winding paths of commerce, to be spent toward a good cause, and forthwith set out on whatever untold adventures the world had in store for them. We carefully counted and re-counted the money, and wrote the amount on the top line of the first page of a yellow spiral-bound college-ruled steno pad (much like the notepads that Gwen, my amanuensis, uses to record this narrative), clipped the pen to the pad and put it in the box to keep the cash company, along with a calculator for subtracting expenses. This was the entire extent of the bookkeeping system we cleverly designed for the company expense account of our now-considerably-enriched avant-garde theatre group, the Shakespeare Underground. Leon and I decided on a combination that we each committed to memory, set the combination, shut the box tight, and locked it.

Then we immediately opened it again to pay for lunch. We extracted two of the crisp hundred-dollar bills, fastidiously marked the expense on the steno pad, locked the box, stashed it under the futon, and took a train downtown for celebratory steaks. It took a while to find a nice restaurant that we hadn’t swindled before, but we found one, and over top sirloins and martinis we discussed the immediate future of the Shakespeare Underground. Our first argument concerned the venue. We arrived at no immediate conclusions, as Leon was hard-pressed to think of a theatrical venue that he had not been barred from for some reason or other. Our second argument concerned our first significant production expense, which was to be my nose surgery. Leon argued that it was an unnecessary and irresponsible use of company funds, the relevance of which to the project at hand was questionable at best. Leon, it turned out, would later have to eat a lot of crow concerning his initial objections to my nose surgery, because the surgery in an unexpected way led to the resolution of the first argument. Then we entered the serious planning stages, i.e., preproduction. What we imagined was spectacular, veritably epic in scope and ambition. We had the first of many conversations about what was needed to resuscitate the theatre for the coming twenty-first century — for that was our ultimate aim. I’d been reading Stanislavsky, I’d been reading Artaud. This reading was all part of Leon’s required reading list for my tutelage in modern dramaturgy. As a teacher, Leon equally emphasized both theory and practice, and was particularly interested in the theories of Artaud.

“This shall probably be the greatest production of Shakespeare in history,” said Leon. He gingerly pushed his hair back from his face with his fingertips to prevent it from getting in the martini he was slurping. I had to agree.

“I have realized,” Leon continued, “that Shakespeare wrote at the tail end of the period in human history in which the magic of the narrative art was still truly alive. Later, the wild animal of Shakespeare was captured, killed, taxidermized, and enshrined by the idiotic and anodyne scholarship of the four sad centuries that have followed him, but this obviously is not the Bard’s fault. We must save Shakespeare from his admirers, from his murderers. We must save him by doing away with the tyranny of the text.”

I asked how this might be possible.

“An excellent question. The task that lies before us now is to undo the damage that the Enlightenment and its subsequent centuries have wrought upon the narrative arts. We must revive a sense of danger to the theatre, a sense of vitality. To break down not just the fourth wall, but also the first, the second, and the third. These walls should never have been built. Do you follow?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then I shall explain. After many exhaustive years of careful study and reflection on the matter, I have arrived at the inconvenient conclusion that the Enlightenment caused the beginning of the downfall of Western theatre, just as it ruined nearly everything else. You will notice, for instance, that the centuries following Shakespeare produced astonishingly little literature that may be deemed truly significant. The work of Edgar Rice Burroughs is an exception. And some Dickens. But they were swimming against the current.” Leon paused to insert a generous plug of steak into his cheeks. “Take the Ancients,” he went on, gesturing with his fork, his words pillowed in his cheeks by his chewing. “For them, theatre could not be disentangled from the very fabric of life. The Romans took the theatre so seriously that they were known to occasionally execute people onstage, and would write these executions into their plays, as sort of, you know, plot points.”

“One might argue,” I felt it necessary to point out, “that we should not admire the seriousness with which the Romans took the theatrical arts, but rather be appalled at how seriously they didn’t take the dignity of human life.”

“Bah! What a deeply uninteresting perspective. Please henceforth banish it from your mouth in my presence.”

“Sorry.”

“Right. Where was I? I would speculate that Western theatre began its steady crumbling decline around the fall of the Roman Empire, and was nearly complete by the mid-seventeenth century. After that, it would never be as good again. Why, you may ask? Because after that historical moment, the narrative arts had become severed from the body of society — severed like a limb is severed! After that, all narrative art was placed inside a display case, as something to be viewed safely from outside. It became like a caged animal, pacing back and forth before the bars, to be awed and admired only from behind a protective barrier.”

“I know how that feels!”

“Precisely! You are in a unique position, Bruno, because you have seen this cage from both within and without. And just as you have liberated yourself from the confines of this cage, we must liberate narrative art from its cage. We must return the theatre back to the wild, where it is free, if it so chooses, to rip its spectators to bloody shreds!”

“The theatre of wild animals!”

“Bruno!”—Leon grasped me by the arm, grasped it as forcefully as if he had just suffered a heart attack—“What a brilliant phrase! The theatre of wild animals!”

We toasted to this coinage, violently knocking our martinis together in celebration. An idea had just been born. The theatre of wild animals: we fell in love with the idea at once. In the meantime, I was able to convince Leon to begrudgingly permit me to borrow — he considered it a loan, a term I hoped he would forget about — seven hundred dollars from our company cash box to pay for my nose.

My nose. Exactly as I once did, Gwen, upon the lid of a now-quasimythical Plexiglas box on the floor of a small white room in the Behavioral Biology Laboratory of the University of Chicago — the box that led me into civilization — years later, with the same ape knuckles I knocked three times: knock, knock, knock . Only this time it was not a transparent plastic box containing a peach that I knocked three times upon, but rather a door — a door I had seen once before — in back of an inconspicuous Brazilian beauty salon. Beside me stood my magnitudinous friend, Leon Smoler, who, finally bending to my desire to have a new nose, had driven me in his ex-wife’s Wagoneer from the apartment we shared on City Island to this place, and would drive me home following my operation. On the drive to Queens we noticed that Leon’s ex-wife’s car was running low on gas. This problem would have been easy enough to ameliorate, but Leon, acting in rational economic self-interest by seeking to minimize production expenses, wanted to milk every last possible mile out of the current contents of the fuel tank, and he planned to make the eighth of a tank that was already at our disposal when we picked it up from Leon’s ex-wife’s house in Yonkers last all the way from City Island to Queens, then back to City Island, to our apartment behind Artie’s Shrimp Shanty, where he would tenderly outstretch me supine on my bed to convalesce, then back to Yonkers to return the car. I expected to be anesthetized and in no shape to see myself home after the surgery. So long as I got my nose — and I am infinitely grateful to Leon for this favor — I chose not to advise him as to the wisdom or folly of his plan, nor to the ethical questions it raised.