The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [137]
Don’t worry, Gwen, I’m not offended that stage fright prevented your acting in my play. I am afraid our production was amateurish at best. Chimps are very difficult to direct. I’m seriously considering learning the dark art of puppetry. Puppets would be more obedient actors.
I’m concerned about Leon. Leon is now over sixty. He has a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek, a white beard, a decreasing leg and an increasing belly, every part about him blasted with antiquity. His gait is slow and uncertain, his flesh doesn’t have the sanguinity it used to. A man of great heart and courageous stomach, he’s been dragging his body through hell all his life. He looks much older than he really is. Leon is the best and the last great friend I have left in the world, and I’m afraid it may be sooner than I’d like that I’ll lose him, too. Freud observed that to love anyone is to give fate a hostage. These days, when I see Leon, I can almost see fate standing behind him with a knife pressed against his fat throat. I’m afraid for him. I will miss him when he’s gone. We have heard the chimes at midnight. That we have, that we have.
Our performance of Woyzeck, as I’m sure you observed, was marred by an irritating accident. There is a train track that passes right outside the grounds of the Zastrow National Primate Research Center, situated somewhere in rural Georgia, USA. Every once in a while—probably three or four times a day—a freight train thunders by the research center. It makes a deafening noise, usually accompanied by a long, low blast from its horn and an uncertain shuddering of the earth, during which everything in this place is set to slight wobbling. The apes—by which I mean the animal apes, the non-enculturated chimps, bonobos, and orangutans who live in this research center—they love it. They are so mystified and enchanted and terribly impressed with all the phenomena that occur every time a train passes. During these few minutes of rumbling, bellowing, and earth-shaking that happen several times daily, they all—down to an ape—commence to jump up and down, clap their hands, howl and pant-hoot and scream in wonder and irrepressible joy. And, as bad luck had it, at the absolute emotional climax of the play—the moment when Woyzeck murders his wife in a fit of jealous rage—what should happen, but that goddamn train decided to blast by outside the research center. As I staggered onstage with angst-haunted eyes and the retractable-bladed plastic toy knife in my hand, that stupid train chose that particular moment to blow its stupid horn and come rolling its stupid way along its stupid tracks, and at that moment, all the walls of our onstage narrative—fourth, third, second, first—instantly came crashing down, and not in a good way. All the chimps on the stage (except one) and all the chimps in the audience, when they heard that train roaring by, felt instantly compelled to start jumping up and down, clapping, hooting, howling, and screaming out in joyous rapture—completely ruining my play. All of my actors immediately forgot their roles, and were no longer characters in one of the greatest psychological dramas of early modern theatre, but were just chimps again, enthralled with a train.
The train passed, the apes recovered, and we forged ahead with the few minutes of the play that remained. But the moment had been ruined, and the time was irrecoverable. I almost cried. I wonder if those clear-minded creatures would be so impressed by passing trains if they understood what they were. To them, the trains mean only that for a few minutes, for some reason, the predictable behavior of the universe has been briefly upended. Suddenly nature has gone unaccountably bonkers, something has replaced the stillness and quiet of the outside world with a circus of sound and vibration. So they all clap and hoot and howl at the spectacle, because