Modern Witches and Brain Hemingway, 16 May 2024

Modern Witches and Brain Hemingway are two distinct shows that found each other at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and fit each other like gloves. Tonight, I saw them presented back-to-back as one theatrical piece at The Players Theater in New York City. Thematically, both shows touch upon the idea of artists interacting with their inspirations, and, when taken together, ask some very poignant questions about the craziness and potentially destructive nature of such interactions. What I loved about these two plays when taken together was that the Modern Witches provided some answers to these questions that, less than an hour later Brain Hemingway was calling back into question.

Artists and mental illness have always gone hand in hand, along with the way we talk about and define brilliance. Modern Witches explored the assertion that emulating your inspiration in your daily life, in this case, Virginia Woolf, does not, in fact, make you crazy. Brain Hemingway, on the other hand, leaned into the idea that interacting with your inspiration, in this case, Ernest Hemingway, and hearing their voice and feeling their influence in your daily life does, in fact, make you crazy when you lose sight of your own voice in the process. While Modern Witches showcased a protagonist who wanted desperately to hear and channel Virginia Woolf, the protagonist of Brain Hemingway desperately wanted Hemingway’s voice in her head to stop so that she could write her own story regardless of whether or not her inspiration was accurately represented. The protagonist of Brain Hemingway wanted to represent herself, while the protagonist of Modern Witches wanted to escape from herself.

Both protagonists ultimately do interact directly with their inspirations. In Modern Witches, this is done through projection design taking place through a psychic medium. The actress in the video is, in fact, the same actress who is on stage playing the protagonist. This conclusion suggests that it is impossible to see anyone other than yourself reflected back at you; even when you know everything there is to know about the source of your inspiration, you are still only seeing what you see in them, which is often bits and pieces of yourself.

In Brain Hemingway, the protagonist asserts that she has lost herself in her commitment to her inspiration and that this dialogue is no longer serving her—it is preventing her from writing anything creative because she is so strongly under the influence of the factual realities of her inspiration—what Hemingway would say or do fabricated from the things he actually said and did. Yet by the end, she is able to overcome this by leaning into something far more powerful than what initially inspired her about Hemingway—she leans into the lesser known facts that she learned through her research that unmask Hemingway’s arrogance and allow her to envision him as human, similar to herself. Rather than looking at Hemingway and seeing herself, she looks at herself and allows herself some artistic license, by acknowledging that, in addition to lesser known facts, there could be unknown facts. This vein of thinking sets her free to use her imagination and create something she wants to see, rather than only see herself as the parts of her that match the man who inspires her art (or the parts of her that she imagines her inspiration might approve of).

Overall, I loved the way these stories complimented each other. With Modern Witches first, I got a clear sense of the thesis of the very fine line between feeling inspired and feeling anxiously haunted by the presence of admiration and the absence of emotional connection. Brain Hemingway then stepped in to walk this same line with the presence of emotional connection and the absence of admiration. Everything about these two works in juxtaposition screamed, “this is the way artistic inspiration works… but is it though?” The questions and the answers and the questions fed each other as a cycle.

Given how well these two plays work in sequence, I couldn’t help but wonder what it might be like to see them in parallel. On one side of the stage, we have Modern Witches going scene by scene as the protagonist gets increasingly worked up. On the other, we have Brain Hemingway going scene by scene as the protagonist gets increasingly calmed down. It would be very interesting to see these two plays really weld together, swapping back and forth between these questions in real time. But it might also be exhausting, and it would take a significant emotional toll on the audience. This series, with its brief couple minute interlude gave us time to process and compartmentalize and look at each concept with fresh eyes, having reset our expectations in the scene change. While I see the idea of a side-by-side presentation as interesting, I don’t see it as a necessity to enjoy what these two works postulate as one combined whole.

The serial juxtaposition definitely strengthens both stories and leaves the audience with a lot more feelings and food for thought than either could on its own, and this level of collaboration and respect is truly an artistic triumph. Modern Witches and Brain Hemingway are greater as a collective than they are as individual parts, and shelving the pride of needing one’s own work to stand on its own makes both works stronger, powerful, and poignant.

I attended this performance on a press pass directly from the artistic team.