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Nick Richardson
A New Brain Dramaturgy Note – Draft 3
10/3/18

Arteriovenous malformation. (Say that three times fast!)

In the human body, arteries carry oxygen-rich blood from the heart to body tissue – in

this case, the brain. The oxygen diffuses into the brain tissue through capillaries. These same

capillaries then absorb carbon dioxide from the tissue, and veins carry the deoxygenated blood

back to the heart. An arteriovenous malformation, or AVM, lacks this network of capillaries;

instead, the arteries and veins link directly to each other, and the brain tissue does not receive

proper oxygen.

AVMs may seem like an obscure topic for a musical (only about one percent of people

experience them), but not for A New Brain’s composer, William Finn. As Finn battled his own

AVM, his longtime collaborator James Lapine encouraged him to consider adapting his

experiences into a production. The impetus to write struck after the fact, for Finn’s recovery

from surgery unleashed a newfound optimism and creative energy. Despite this personal

connection, Finn’s end product is a largely fictional musical sparsely peppered with

autobiographical moments.

Lapine helped steer Finn away from a technical medical documentary to focus on the

relationships between characters, constructing a tangled web of disparate lives. In this way, A

New Brain falls nicely into Finn’s oeuvre of musicals that make traumatic events both personal

and even humorous. His 1992 Tony-winner for Best Musical Falsettos brings the AIDS crisis

home to a family unraveling their own wacky love square. The 25th Annual Putnam County

Spelling Bee spotlights middle school students facing the best and worst of adolescence. A New
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Brain also demonstrates Finn’s signature witty wordplay, only this time in a completely sung-

through format.

This show demands an attentive audience, one that can note all of its sonic and visual

details. Look out for chromosomes, double helixes, and other biology-inspired shapes in Holly

Stone’s choreography. The movement visually represents the inner workings of the brain at the

molecular level. In Finn’s musical, the effects of the AVM result in a sort of double

consciousness: one in the present, the other in a dream-like liminal space where work anxieties

and family histories come alive. Frequently, these worlds collide and hallucinations populate the

stage. This double consciousness allows for eclectic musical influences and physical

vocabularies. These elements, along with a vivid lighting design, help distinguish the AVM-

fueled fantasy scenes from scenes set in reality.

More than the all-too-familiar road-to-recovery narrative, A New Brain dramatizes an

enduring question of our human existence: how do we make the most of our time here? For Finn,

the answer is simple. He makes music. He encourages us to find our own music, and to play on!