The Brothers Paranormal: The Haunted Polis

“Though the rose is crushed, the scent remains.” - Sufi proverb

Vertigo Theatre is staging The Brothers Paranormal from September 27^th to October 26^th. The play follows the lives of two brothers (Max & Visarut) & their mother (Tasanee), and an African American family (Delia & Felix), brought together by a haunting (Ghost - Jay). The brothers run a ghost-busting business. Max is the entrepreneurial opportunist, harbouring little belief in any metaphysical fiat behind the observable world & Visarut is the committed custodian of an Eastern tradition that fuses animism with Buddhism. Delia approaches Max in a desperate attempt to exorcise her home of a malevolent spirit. Max and Delia, because of Hurricane Katrina, have moved to a new city. We find out that Visarut has been through a difficult period (alcoholism, loss of identity with immigration), he is trying to reconstruct his life and Max's business ambition seems like the right platform to rediscover his purpose and ameliorate the family's financial problems. Their mother, Tasanee, seeks to provide the emotional and maternal grounding though which her children can find their sense of meaning in the world. Max pursues the ghost-busting business purely for financial gain, Visarut has other motives (besides financial) in pursuing the business, ones that extend into the domain of metaphysical inquiry. Once Max is hired by Delia (to exorcise the spirit of a girl in their house), a powerful psycho-spiritual journey ensues, one that pushes the limits of reason, belief, and survival.

Poignant themes abound in this play - immigration, family, death and bereavement. At its core, the play operates within what Jacques Derrida (French philosopher) termed a hauntology (the return of the past into the present, unresolved personal histories, the intrusion of a painful absence). Ghosts in this play are spectral embodiments of trauma and unresolved memories. They are dislocated revenants, psychic splinters that refuse to be resolved within linear time.

It is clear in the play that Max and Visarut are contending with their bi-cultural identities, Max is more comfortable in his western milieu (but it is the product of a fair amount of repression), Visarut struggles with integration though and he feels the cultural misalignment of trying to belong to a society in which he has come to believe he has no place. The play’s depiction of Max and Visarut, as bearers of an Eastern cosmology within an American setting, invites a reading of how ‘Easternness’ itself is socially commodified and constructed within Western frameworks. There is an opportunity here for a critique of Orientalism. Edward Said (Arab Literary critic) stated, “from the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the Orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work.” The orientalist here is the Western-trained academic, using the epistemic (Western models of knowledge) structures to legitimize cultural representations in the East through the scientific heritage of the West. It must be stated here that science in the West has often been propounded through a Baconian worldview (Francis Bacon - English philosopher); a belief that the universe abounds with physical laws that allow for the exercising of institutional power towards the achievement of material ends. It is through the harnessing and manipulation of these physical laws that we bind nature and all her children to us into a state of quasi slavery. According to this view, nature is man’s plaything, and we subordinate her to strict empirical outcomes. The same epistemic posture may underlie Orientalism itself, the drive to render the East into legible and classifiable objects, subjecting them to the instruments of Western interpretation. Max’s insistence on prioritizing what can be materially observed and understood through the terms of reason is reflective of this; he is (for the first half of the play) a modern Baconian through and through. There is no room in his worldview (until he is revisited by his trauma in the second act) for a conception of the universe that sees the observable world as living and mysterious super-organism. Nature only exists, for Max, to fulfill material outcomes. He explains to Visarut that one's belief, or lack of belief, in ghosts is completely immaterial running a ghost-busting business, they may or may not exist, who cares, what's important is fostering the illusion of belief for their clients. Visarut's worldview is ritualistic; he carries an animistic cosmology of the world, one that abounds with mythic richness. He pushes back against the entrepreneurial cynicism of Max stating something to the effect of their lived experience being a testament to the palpable existence of ghosts.

 Visarut’s position may be seen as one that advocates for a communal and ‘return to nature/metaphysical’ perspective, he alludes to this in some of his lines. This is a position that seeks to re-orient our place in the world, by seeing it not as belonging within the modern structures of civilization but seeking to exist outside of it, to return to some pre-civilizational modes of communal existence. That being said; we all want something equivalent to a good life, where we can achieve a modicum of financial and material ease. If we are relegated squarely back to a state of nature where there is no harnessing of nature’s power for the achievement of civilizational ends, then we may have to make do with standards of living that are radically different from the ones that we currently have. How many of us, in the first world, are willing to make those concessions?

Questions around contemporary standards of living aside, there is no doubt that a deep appreciation of nature provides not only aesthetic solace but, in the vein of Iris Murdoch (Irish-British philosopher), potentially creates the conditions for moral excellence. For Murdoch, sitting with nature creates a ‘un-selfing’, one where the tight bonds of our egoic and civilizational personas are temporarily loosened. Focusing on the beauty that abounds in nature enables us to see outside of ourselves, and widens our gaze beyond the cultural axioms of material achievement. This self-abandonment, for Murdoch, is what allows us to develop powerful forms of introspection; it is the space of non-space, a liminal zone where the boundaries between subject and object dissolve. It is the interval between the material and the metaphysical, a place where thought and being can exist simultaneously without being rendered through social and intellectual hierarchies. Everything just ‘is’ and it is in this ‘is-ness’ that we understand what and who it is we really are, momentarily freed from the cultural machinery of ‘becoming’.

Powerful counter positions to this can be found, ones that do not romanticize a return to nature and see such a valorization of nature as dangerous and regressive. I go back to a conversation I had with a friend, a social worker, in South Asia, who had a very different conception of nature, one much darker and pessimistic – for him, nature was parasitical, ceaselessly inventing ways of imposing biological decay and ruin on human bodies; nothing was ennobling about nature to him. There was only a relentless appetite to devour its own creations. He saw it daily in the large number of stillbirths, child deaths, infections and diseases that ravaged rural communities in Pakistan. The assault of nature on its subjects was a profound source of horror and malaise for him. The antidote, what he called ‘Civilization with a capital C’, lay in the repossession of human agency through science and reason, a bulwark against nature’s brutal empire of rot and chance. This is certainly emblematic of Max's worldview, for him, the modern calculus of material achievement trumps any metaphysical concern we may have for re-instilling the quiet wisdom of nature into the curriculum of contemporary living.

Apropos of the cultural expression, that a cigar is never just a cigar, in the same vein, we could state that a play is never just a play. It is a cultural artifact and one that, through its characters, plots, and performative power, exposes the epistemic conditions of its making. The Brothers Paranormal becomes a theatre of knowledge systems. We see here the confrontation between a Baconian epistemology of mastery over nature (embodied in Max, who has taken up Western axioms around self-achievement and success) and an animistic epistemology of reverence (embodied in Visarut, where spirits, memories, and ancestors remain active and potent agents in his world). There is also a broader global motif that can be read into this production. The recent tariffs, vis-à-vis the USA and China, may be symbolic enactments of deeper worldviews. Japan, during the Meiji restoration, was deemed the ‘acceptable orient’, but this changed once Japan developed its own autonomous worldview in the 30’s. It cannot be doubted that it was a very problematic worldview, one that gave expression to imperial and militaristic forms of domination. That being said, the message was clear: you can modernize, but you must do so through the terms of Orientalism, under the gaze and epistemic boundaries set by the West. This was also seen in the 80s, once Japan had gone through its post-World War II arc of rehabilitation and construction. Tariffs and containment policies were enacted to rein in the economic prowess of the Asian tiger. This was not merely the expression of an economic strategy but a civilizational reflex. Similarly, China under post-Maoist successors was seen as a State that meaningfully represented the technocratic discipline and political acumen that is emblematic of modern Western States, but this has changed in the last 10 years. It (China) is now no longer seen, through the lens of Orientalism, as the West’s legitimate apprentice. It is beginning to define its own rules of progress and power; the anxiety this evokes is not only economic but civilizational. Whatever one’s ideological view of it (and I do not espouse ideological reflections on this blog, only cultural ones), there is no doubt that this cultural anxiety has a great deal to do with it shedding the skin of the ‘acceptable orient’.         

One can read clear historical themes into the questions around immigration in the play; it is more than just about the inner lives of the Thai immigrants, but as stated above, the redefinition of the East through the Orientalist lens of the West.  This is evident in the way that the ‘East's' identity and culture has historically been commodified and otherised; the ‘Japonisme’ movement in the 19^th century, where ideas around what Japan ‘really’ embodied were engineered through Western conceptions of refinement and exoticism. This was also pointed out by Edward Said in the context of the Middle East, where ideas around Middle Eastern sensuality, despotism and mysticism in the West removed deeper inquiries into the social complexities and nuances of Middle Eastern culture. Do our current ideological preoccupations with the Orient reflect the ‘Japan Panic’ of the 1980s? This question can exist with legitimate moral and geo-political concerns, but it does reveal to us nonetheless how deeply Western consciousness remains haunted by its image of the ‘Oriental Other’. At a psychoanalytical level, conversations around immigration in the West are expressions of what has been termed mirror transference, where subjects, to develop psychological consistency at an intra-personal level, look for self-cohesion in the image of the other. We need to see ourselves in the other to stabilize our own fragmented identities. When we do not find what we are looking for, we panic, not because of the inherent lack that we see in the other, but in the lack that we see in ourselves. Such a lack must not be thought of as a purely theoretical problem; it is a problem that drives entire swathes of people and communities into a sort of fugue (loss of awareness of one’s identity) state, one where the perceived lack in the ‘other’ introduces a loss of our sense of identity and our autobiographical memory. It is no coincidence, in this play, that the theme of immigration is twinned with the metaphysical horror of spectrality, this is because the psycho-social panic and emotional loss that questions around immigration evoke are nothing less than horror. Ask anyone who has lost immigrant family members to suicide or self-annihilation (drugs, violence, etc.), and they will tell you that it is primordial horror. It is watching someone’s spirit rot slowly under the light of another civilization. Visarut is a clear dramatic emblem of this.

The African American couple, Felix and Delia, potentially symbolize something just as interesting – they are Western subjects haunted by the trauma of displacement. Everyone, theoretically, knows the history of the African American community, but we do not know the lived reality that comes with the embodiment of that historical trauma. Every culture has a haunted conscience, and Felix and Delia are the subjects of this historical haunting. This is unburied grief through generations. There is a doubling of grief in this play; Max & Visarut grieve the loss of family, and Felix and Delia stoically grieve the loss of their move from New Orleans (triggered by Hurricane Katrina). There are moments, brief, where Felix & Delia look back on the lost possibilities of their lives with wry wistfulness – and in these moment's the play's hauntology comes into full view. Here there is none of the metaphysical and symbolical hauntology of ghostly visitations, but something quieter and more melancholic - two human beings moving through the shifting center of the world, carrying with them the nostalgia of history and the anxiety of survival. It is the slow ache of continuity in a world that is starting to move without them. We can sense from the outset that the world is starting to shed them from its surface, they are growing too heavy for the velocity of life.

The metaphysical haunting of Felix & Delia’s house is the recognition of something deeper than metaphysical horror, it is a recognition that the origin of horror is not out there, emanating from some supernal niche in the cosmos, but is in here, in the emotional collapse that underscores human relationships. We learn that Delia is haunted by a ghost that seeks to exact revenge because Felix (first-responder) failed to administer the right treatment, to Jay, at a crash site out on the highway or road somewhere. Felix is overworked, financially precarious and embodies the ‘precariat struggle’ of the modern-day economic subject; he is bound to fail, the question is never why, but when, when he will fail. Going back to my conversations with my friend (social worker), he often remarked how helpless he felt at being unable to structurally address the broader concerns of the community he attended to. He stated that compassion was rationed by time, fatigue, and circumstance. Jay, in some ways, may be a symbolic remonstration against the collapse of the modern State’s welfare ethos – it has been argued that care has been systematized to the point of abstraction in modern systems. With the impersonal and fatigued management of these functions potentially comes the cultivation of a false civic solidarity. Jay's visitations may be the hauntological grief that accompanies the collective loss of civic cohesion, the cumulative result of a modern politics without a capital P.

The play shows us the temporal limits of love in understanding what is at times a bewildering world. How do we deal with the loss and self destruction of our loved ones? In the words of Walter Benjamin (German Philosopher), “The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.” Maybe this is what the play teaches us: that sometimes, both, our knowledge systems and structures of hope will collapse at the threshold of love; it (love) is sometimes an existential haunting (unrealized aspirations, dreams, hopes & promises) that scientific reason nor mythic reverence can exorcise. The play is ultimately an epistemology of failure, where love is both a beautiful and devastating catastrophe. To love is to stand haplessly and hopelessly before all the forms of annihilation the world presents; living with the awareness that neither knowledge nor superstition can insulate us from the catastrophic contingencies that human love is enveloped by. No wonder gambling (read as the expression of cosmic chance) is a recurrent motif in the play - we are only as good as our last hand, we persist in love and hope even as the odds collapse and fate comes calling to collect. I cannot directly tie this theme to an incident in the play, as it would reveal far too much for those who have not seen the play, but suffice to say - as the end of the play shows us, hope and love are always outpaced by what 'actually' happens in the world, it is this 'catching' up (to save those that we love) that becomes the great tragic rhythm of human life.

At the level of a broader political reading, the play may be a clear demonstration that just like the ghosts in the play, modern democracy is anamorphic and protean, structured by the spectral formlessness of the 'many'. Such a ‘many’ is not unitary in structure but constituted of historico-cultural fragments (like the ghosts in this play) – plural voices and histories that co-inhabit a fragile social body. Every nation is in some ways an ‘imagined community’ (Benedict Anderson), and Max’s dialogue with his spectres symbolizes this – The modern polis is haunted not only by the dead but by the living whose stories have gone unheard. An ambitious reading of the play may see it as an allegory of modern democratic citizenship – how it is assembled from cultural memory, migration, and myth. Jay is the spectral haunting of a citizen who does not know why she could not be saved, why she was failed by people who administer care in its (State) name, and why she had to die alone in the middle of nowhere without the warm embrace of her family and friends. Seen in this light, this play is a requiem for the unseen citizen - people, who like Jay, are the ghosts in our haunted polis.

Just like Max seeks to understand the context of Delia’s haunting, so too must we seek to understand the contexts of our fellow citizens, the histories and the losses that constitute the shared and dissonant space that we call Canadian society.

This cannot only be done through a Baconian compression of communal experience through the prism of science, but must be done through, both, an ethics of listening and an appreciation of lived reality, a sensibility that allows for the discernment of all that is spectral (the unheard and the unseen) within the social.

At the end of the play, we discover that Max's reality is psychologically fragmented - we do not know where imagination begins and reality ends. Max experiences a painful shedding (un-selfing) at the end, he is no longer Thai nor American, neither the sum of his scientific certainties nor supernatural experiences - his grief has thrust him into a Murdochian non-space, he just is and in this 'is-ness', who he was and who he is has collapsed into a radical nakedness of being. Here, he is free from the possession and performance of identity. All that remains is an unmediated awareness of existence. Max and Visarut, exorcise Jay from Delia's life, by understanding her story and her grief, and in witnessing the un-selfing of Max we (audience) become inheritors of the same task - to bear witness, and live in a state of radical awareness, to lives and losses that exceed narrative closure. Maybe, this is what classic films around the exorcism genre get wrong (i.e., 'The Exorcist'), exorcism isn't expulsion or driving these hauntings away but recognizing that they will always be a part of us. There is no question of us ever expunging them from the structure of our lived experience, because they are not 'out there', how can they be? They are constitutive of the architectures of memory and meaning that we live with and are defined by. Can we resolve existential suffering through scientific Reason or metaphysical acuity? Not in the world of this play. They are twin lamps in the same darkness; when their light fades, all that we are left with is ourselves - out there, alone with Jay, somewhere in the great unknown.

The production – This is a good production, evocative on many levels. There is a simplicity to it that is very deceptive (which is why this review took me a while to issue). If one is willing to look past the veneer of simplicity, they will see little flourishes and nuances that beautify the performative and textual depth of the production. The production has a delayed effect, and this is a feature that is quite simply outstanding. If you give it enough thought and sit with it (after you leave), you will see latent themes rise to the surface (it keeps coming, I have already edited this review/essay five times to put in more content because the themes keep revealing themselves). The production values are good, but it is obvious that the artistic auteurs behind this production have put an accent on the performances and the collaboration of the performative talent on stage. There is a very healthy respect for the text in this performance; it breathes on stage with performances that embody it with authenticity and clinical effect. This is a hallmark of a production that stamps its dramaturgical resonance on its audience - we walk out with more questions than we walk in with, questions that gradually open up multiple lines of inquiry. Questions that instill a thirst to understand our world, both outer and inner. The synergy between the cast was excellent; there were warts, but I personally do not care about that at all. Authenticity and the quiet revelation of self that artistic immersion creates will always be worth every wart and blemish. This is much more exciting and dynamic than mechanical performances that try to push preconceived notions of what performative excellence looks like onto the audience. Authentic spontaneity is where the magic happens; this is where the real culture building begins at the level of performative expression, and this production has embraced it with courage. The characters felt inhabited and experientially embodied. At no time did they feel like flat representations, but felt summoned on stage with reflection and care.

Ray Strachan (Felix) was brilliant, playing with a variety of performative colours and hues. He took the stage with vulnerability, honesty, and total exposure. There is something to be said for an actor who will lead with affective honesty, letting the text play itself out on stage with whatever is found instead of forcing it to conform to ideations that may have no place in that lived moment. It is an excellent showcase of riding the wave on stage with calculated abandon. Jamillah Ross (Delia) was good, playing with poise and a casual economy of motion, never feeling compelled to rush into a beat. This was very interesting to see: an actor who will take their time to ferret out the emotional resonance on stage before pressing the issue. Carolyn Fe (Tasanee) was excellent, playing with a maternal energy that was rich with humour, wit, and affection. She was able to jump quickly between beats that either required convivial wittiness or emotional profundity. Her monologue (at the end) was beautiful and painful; it was like overhearing a conversation that one shouldn't be hearing, it stunned me with its rawness and vulnerability. This page is never confessional, but I will admit it stirred a quiet grief; if one experientially connects with the theme of the monologue, they will find it especially powerful and cathartic. Her dramatic energy with Max is layered and complex, resisting easy categorization. Carolyn owns the stage with charm and confidence. Aaron Refugio (Visarut) was measured and engaging, playing with a quiet and understated presence; his comedic timing was on point, and his dramatic scenes were economical, putting in as much as was needed and no more. There was a philosophy of restraint in his performance, and this was very interesting to see. Daniel Fong (Max) was good, playing with urgent energy. I did feel that the representation of his energy became predictable by the end of the first act; that energy works very well in the second act, but seems overplayed till before then. I have, in a previous review, called this the law of equivalency, where the performative expressions progressively become more flattened and draw from the same psychological stock of emotional responses. As stated above, though, this is not a problem in the second act and towards the end, we start to see some interesting nuances in his performance. Heidi Damayo (Jay) played a mute role, but it was an important role; her characterization was pitch-perfect, never loud enough to capsize the emotional development on stage and never too understated. Esther Jun & Kodie Rollan (Director & Assistant Director) have put up a very good representation, one that brings a great simplicity to this production. The balance between the production elements and the performances is good; they complement each other with commensurate application. The production elements are effective and ride behind the performance, and not the other way around.

Scott Reid creates a great set - simple, but effective in partitioning the space. Ajay Badoni's work is interesting, creating the right lighting balance to complement the inner development of the characters on stage. Alexandra Cowman creates a simple yet poignant sound design on stage. John Iglesias makes great choices for the characters, I struggled to understand the rationale for Visarut's costume at first but the more we learn of Visarut the more obvious this choice becomes.

This production lingers like the afterimage of a dream, part grace and part anguish. Vertigo’s The Brothers Paranormal reveals that some of us might never escape our ghosts. We are condemned to become them, inheriting and carrying their questions forward. Maybe, love and hope persist not in the expectation that these questions will ever be resolved, but in the tragic acceptance of their impossibility.

Rating 7.5/10