Peformance Review: Hydriotaphia, or the Death of Dr. Browne

Figure 1.

Death (Paul Hope), Sir Thomas Browne (Jonathan Hadary), and Dr. Browne’s Soul (Jenny Bacon, above) in the Alley Theatre of Houston’s production of Tony Kushner’s Hydriotaphia, directed by Michael Wilson. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.

Figure 2.

Sir Thomas Browne (Jonathan Hadary) in the Alley Theatre of Houston’s production of Tony Kushner’s Hydriotaphia, directed by Michael Wilson. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.

Figure 3.

Dr. Schadenfreude (John Feltch) and Sir Thomas Browne (Jonathan Hadary) in the Alley Theatre of Houston’s production of Tony Kushner’s Hydriotaphia, directed by Michael Wilson. Photo: Charles Erickson.

“The moments in history that interest me the most are of transition,” Tony Kushner explains in the program notes for the Alley Theatre’s production of his Hydriotaphia, or the Death of Dr. Browne. Written a decade ago, this is the play’s professional premiere, following its original non-Equity performance and a recent student production at New York University. Hydriotaphia is based on the last day in the life of Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682), noted scientist, writer, and, according to Kushner, seminal capitalist. Hydriotaphia explores the simultaneously harrowing and comic experience of politics, spirituality, and gender using the author’s characteristic combination of cinematic and Brechtian techniques. As in his more recent plays, Kushner boldly mixes realistic and phantasmagoric effects that feature embodiments of death, souls, and witches who roam through this antic and chilling “epic farce.”

Meaning urne-burial, “Hydriotaphia” is the title of a 1658 Browne essay that concludes that God does not necessarily promise immortality to human beings. This notion provides Kushner with the jumping-off point for a provocative and irreverently whimsical drama. Lying miserably on his deathbed, Browne is depicted as a grasping and unfeeling conservative. He is in business with a stuttering pastor, Dogwater (Charles Dean), whose motto “accumulate, accumulate” is shared by Browne. They have seized some Norfolk common lands, forced the residing peasants off, and created a quarry, whose pounding engines are heard in the distance. Despite the riotous comic drive of the plot, however, Hydriotaphia is in the end a deeply disturbing meditation on death. There is more unbridled anarchy and uninhibited creativity in this play than in Kushner’s later works, which is reflected in the play’s dialogue. In order to avoid a stilted stage British dialect, Kushner invents a crazy quilt language that is equal parts Brooklynese, Teutonic, and Yiddish, with touches of Cajun and Creole thrown in. The result is a loony, but ultimately expressive and musical dialect that continues to a final projected motto announcing “da verra end” of the play.

“You who must live through this, I pity you,” Browne cries from his deathbed as he is besieged by the living and the dead. Played with irreverence and passion by Jonathan Hadary, Browne imagines his death grandly as the sailing of a great ship, but his wife, Dorothy (Shelley Williams), sees things differently. Believing her whole generation to be “cursed by our gold,” she realizes that Browne “never meant to harm,” despite the fact that he “did not live well upon this earth.” Compounding Browne’s dilemma, his Soul, played with an effective mix of winsomeness and irony by Jenny Bacon, is angry that he struggles to hang on to the fading shreds of his life, preventing her from being freed from his body. Despite her plaintive songs, Soul becomes increasingly human “meat” who realizes that Browne is “murdering the song” of her possible ascension. She declares that he will die of constipation, and he does, suffering from an onion-sized blockage in his intestines that distends his stomach to the point of explosion. After death, Browne returns to the stage to wish he was alive again “to eat, to greedily gorge” on the world itself. But his world has collapsed with his death as the thunder of the quarry machines, which match his final desperate...