What is The Wooden Breeks about?

Playwright Glen Berger on the next Lookingglass production

From The Wooden Breeks Issue of ArtAntica
Mentioned in this entry: Mary Zimmerman and Larry DiStasi

ArtAntica: What is The Wooden Breeks about?
(Taken from the introduction to The Wooden Breeks) Glen Berger: In 19th century Britain, panic swept the land when coffins randomly unearthed were found to contain scratchmarks on the inside of the lid. Apparently people were being mistakenly pronounced dead when in fact they were merely comatose, and, subsequently, buried alive. (“Breeks” is Scots dialect for breeches, and “the wooden breeks” literally, “the wooden pants” the vernacular for a coffin.) To allay the fears of the populace, companies began producing bell devices. Such a device could sit on top of your grave, with a cord that ran down a tube through the ground, and into your coffin. If you found yourself alive in your coffin, you could pull the cord, which triggered the bell, which alerted the town to come and unearth you. However, a worm, or the wind, or the shifting of bones would often trigger the cord, and there was more than one incident of a crowd running to unearth a resuscitated corpse only to be met with the more-than-disheartening sight of a loved one in an advanced state of putrefaction. It is within this world of desperate hope and mourning that our story unfolds.

The Wooden Breeks begins outside the town of Clekan-wittit, latter nineteenth century. A tinker, Tom “Chimney” Bosch, is putting out the remains of a fire in his firepit while brooding about a woman he once madly loved named Hetty. Hetty had surprised the courting Bosch by suddenly marrying a worthless sailor. She became pregnant, her husband abandoned her, and Bosch proposed to her soon after the birth of her bairn, Wicker. Hetty accepted, but left for “a brief but unavoidable errand,” before the wedding, promising she’d return before the tinker’s fire currently flickering in the firepit had died. However, she never did return. Nine years pass, with Bosch feeding his fire in the increasingly bleak hope that Hetty will make good her promise and return before his “little fire” dies out, suspecting all the while that she simply abandoned her son and himself. Bosch, despising Wicker and assuming no responsibility over the years in the raising of him, has, nevertheless, on occasion, indulged the urchin and narrated yet another chapter in an interminable and wholly fictional saga of where Hetty Grigs is now, and why it is taking her so damned long to return (adventures ranging from “being marauded by pirates” to “long line at the shops”). Bosch claims his inspiration for these chapters comes from “the little tinker’s fire” itself.

However, when the play opens, we find Bosch putting out the fire. He has resolved once and for bloody all to leave this corner of the world (and Wicker) behind. Before he manages to leave however, a cow-urine-soaked Wicker appears. Wicker, desperate to keep Bosch from leaving, discovers one last unextinguished (and seemingly unextinguishable) ember in the firepit. Although Bosch can’t stand the sight of this homeless urchin, he relents to Wicker’s pleadings and agrees to use the ember to narrate one last confounded chapter of the endless tale, adding that when the ember dies, he’s abandoning the orphaned boy forever.

As Bosch begins to narrate, the ember in the firepit rises to become the light of a lighthouse. Bosch has placed Wicker and himself in Brood, a sort of miserable and famine-plagued Brigadoon. In Brood, we find Jarl van Hoother, the lighthouse keeper, who has never left the lighthouse—his only contact with the outside world being appendices to the Ferguson and Ives Natural Science Encyclopaedia that are delivered through his mailslot; Armitage Shanks and Tricity Tiara, the town lovers, who have vowed never to marry, for “marriage is the enemy of true love”; Mrs. Nelles, who has been in mourning over the death of her daughter for innumerable years now, and, with unintentioned cruelty, has kept the single public house of Brood shut all the while, thus depriving the town of drink; Enry Leap, the Vicar, nursing a secret and painful long-standing love for Mrs. Nelles and her whiskey; Toom the Stoup, the occasionally graverobbing gravedigger; and Wicker Grigs, whom Bosch, spitefully, has placed in the tale as a much-abused orphan who delivers the post. Bosch intends the chapter to be as dull, as abusive-to-Wicker, and as Hetty-less as he can, so that Wicker will give up and let Bosch abandon the story (and Wicker). Wicker, however, is just as determined to keep Bosch from leaving, and insists that the story has to continue until the ember (now the lighthouse light) dies, just as Bosch had promised.

Bosch summons a salesman to help him get into the impenetrable lighthouse and snuff the flame, but, to Bosch’s surprise, the salesman to arrive is a woman--Anna Livia Spoon—who bears an uncanny, suspicious resemblance to Hetty Grigs. She has come selling bell devices, and has just one more to sell to make her quota. She isn’t in town long before all the inhabitants have been affected by her singular presence. However, due perhaps to the town’s crushing proverty, she is unable to sell her last device. By the end of Act One, someone has died under curious circumstances, and Hetty’s last bell device is erected over the grave. But is the person really dead? Is that bell ever going to ring? What brings us to Brood? What keeps us in Brood? And how do we escape from that cursed place?

And mind you, “to brood” means not only “to mull darkly over events long past” but also “to await for new life to hatch.”