Doctor Vysarius

Librettist's Note

Stars are fixed and they persist, but we persist just long enough to know we are not fixed. And they are so far away, and there is something in us that will love a far-off thing—because it is so far, and indistinct, and permanent. And here we are, on earth, so closely packed, and so distinct, so painfully impermanent, even in our character, that it is no wonder we chase after stars.

Doctor Vysarius was imagined as the marriage of a glam rock record and the weird, dusty LPs of mid-century RSC productions you might find in a bin at the back of a record shop—of David Bowie and the spooky sonorities of John Gielgud, whispering behind an arras. From our present age of grand illusion, the play turns back toward another—the 17th century: a blazing world of waning monarchs, mystic charlatans, star-mad scientists, and growing existential unrest barely disguised by a taste for frenzied, metastatic ornamentation. The Church sat jealously, then, in purple and in gold, upon the border of modernity, arresting more-unflattering discoveries—and their discoverers.

In the play, one of those discoverers builds a new, far-seeing telescope and glimpses something in the heavens hurtling towards Earth, but a mute magician newly arrived at court (Doctor Vysarius) keeps anyone from heeding his warnings. As the heavens tumble down, and visions of vivisected angels begin to populate his dreams, the astronomer battles with Vysarius for the attention of the impish boy-emperor. All the while, he is aided by his lover, the court jester, whom he increasingly estranges and, finally, abandons in his monomaniacal pursuit of Doctor Vysarius.

But, of course, what a play is and what it’s about are different (though related) things . . .

It is about a kind of isolation in which closeness feels like an impossibility, abstract and brutal, like the paradoxes of the physicists; about love for what you cannot have, that seems to offer an infinity precisely because you cannot have it, and you are frozen in the ache and motion of your wanting. It is, too, about the danger of losing what you have (that is, what loves you back) in favor of a thing that you will never have. It’s about, in other words, what we do every day—on our own and altogether, never choosing this world, but some other that is harder, colder, less humane. Maybe we feel that we deserve it; or, though we feel that we deserve a better world than this, our power of imagination is insufficient to the task of thinking up a “better world” that still has people in it—ourselves included.

Doctor Vysarius was produced and recorded in spring 2021, as part of the Iowa Playwrights’ Workshop’s yearly New Play Festival. We were, then, further from each other than we had ever been. We spoke only through the phone, sent messages into the ether, met with students, friends, and coworkers online; we lived like stars, and threw our beams upon each other from a distance. We sat still, in isolation, and we burned. But Jeremy and I and the others who made this thing came together through it, and, eventually, through some miracle, we moved together in one space and sang.

***

Let me spoil the plot for you (I don’t mind if you don’t—but you can come back later if you like): when the astronomer peers into the heavens, he sees more than stars. He sees, through unthinkable and endless cosmic murk, the throne of God. And the force of his gaze (you know, don’t you, that looks can kill?) knocks loose a wheel from this throne. Outraged, God sends this wheel careering towards Earth and, acting as its herald, a prosecuting angel: Doctor Vysarius. What, in the end, comes crashing down is the enormous, broken body of an angel—for what other thing should the throne of God use for a wheel? So, for all his chilly, astronomical abstraction, the stargazer is faced, finally, with the bodily closeness he had looked to avoid–now unhappily, now catastrophically.

A year after recording Doctor Vysarius, after a long illness, I found myself in a hospital bed, losing blood, doctors refusing to offer the encouragement one wants, and scarce more than one needs. But through it all, someone stayed close who could have chosen otherwise, stayed close to one who could not choose but to have a body and to bleed—choosing the now, no matter how, over the could or should.

Everything ends in the body, in the closeness of you and I, here and now, in the world we share. It cannot be another way; our choice, only, is to be grateful to be close or no. The poet W.H. Auden, with whom I began, was right to correct his former line, that “we must love one another or die.” For it is true, and terribly and beautifully true, that “we must love one another and die”—and, indeed, to ransack yet one further poet, just that and only that, is all, on earth, you need to know.

***

What follows is the libretto for Doctor Vysarius alongside the music, so that you can read and listen at the same time as you click through the play. (The album can also be found on Spotify and Qobuz.) I hope you’ll enjoy what you hear, and, if you do, you might also explore the rest of the site, which contains a record of the long history of this project—including a weird short film, a shadow-puppetry show, and a radio drama. Many wonderful people have left their mark on this little object, and you will find their names inscribed throughout. Additionally, the album you are about to hear would not have been possible without the support of the University of Iowa’s Department of Theatre Arts who provided the trust, the space, and the safety to put it together.

I’d end by saying “the doctor will see you now,” but I think that’s too silly, even for me.

—Steven Glavey

P.S. The doctor will see you now . . .