(cover image from "posthumous" first edition of Bhujarti, 2003)
Here are just a few of Hardiner's more significant works, in brief.
Syrial, play (1993)
Hardiner's earliest play (or at least the earliest we know of) was published through Pinkum Press in 1993; there was a run of 500 copies, and it was never performed during the author's lifetime. ...It feels weird typing that: while the author was active. This play follows a plane full of people discussing conspiracy theories. It is quite a strange play. A passenger accumulates "companion plants" until the fuselage looks like a jungle, and the plane may or may not be in the air, and they are almost definitely not going to Syria. The Professor character goes on and on about the Law of Conservation of Information. The play either restarts somewhere in the middle and takes a slightly different direction, or the characters don't notice that they repeat themselves wholecloth. Of course, it's subtitled "a still-life with movement". In a conversation I had with Rex Patch, Dr Patch made the observation that it's "Harry Hardiner's 9/11 play": after that, I can't ever read it the same way again.
Burnt Lace, play (1995)
In a similarly miniscule run two years later, Hardiner published another unproduced play, Burnt Lace. The southern plantation home of the Burnish family is on fire. This play is the story of 60 seconds in that fire, played out over 60 minutes or more. One production in Atlanta had a runtime of over 3 hours. Over that time, characters deliver lengthy speeches that range from the heat to their histories to theories on heaven and far beyond, there are songs, there are dances, there is the stage direction "they dance because they smell delicious", and it's possible that the entire story is a murder mystery. What's not to like?
Tsai, novel (1997)
This novel about a "created intelligence" (the eponymous Tsai says at one point, "There is nothing artificial about my intelligence," which might be the core message of the book) seems to have come from an earlier story called Mindflight. As Tsai becomes capable of arming itself and altering its physical surroundings, scientist Dr Paul uploads his own mind into the cortex to attempt to stop the force's reign of terror. Their struggle through circuits and soft organic loops makes up the last third of the book, and it's in lovely poetry and harsh technical prose.
Bhujarti, play (post.)
The rumor is, the manuscript of Bhujarti was found on Hardiner's desk the night the police were called to his Murfreesboro complex, left unfinished except in scenario form after the first scene: the Baron and his court, including Casey Jones, Madame Sosostris, Billy Man, and Rumsfeld, claim to know the world is slowing to a stop. In iambic pentameter, all of them come to an uneasy agreement that it was time to summon Bhujarti (no, it's never concretely explained) which will unravel this universe but rekindle the engines of time for the possibility of a new one. Suffice it to say, after this first scene and the infamous "invitation" (see also, Explosionism) which concludes it, things get a little weird. Think Kokoschka weird. Artaud ain't seen shit. Needless to say, staging is difficult. The few times it's been attempted, terrible things have happened to the actors on- and off-stage. So of course, we say the play is cursed. ...The play isn't cursed. There's no such thing as curses. It's what happens when people who are interested in Hardiner AND theatre AND horror put on a play soaked in slippery blood and off-brand hanging harnesses. The stage fires, the murder-suicides, the bankruptcies, and the romantic failures are pretty easy to understand. And the meningitis outbreak at that one performance in Minnesota was unusually fast-burning but hardly supernatural. Still, I can't wholeheartedly recommend that you try to stage it. I think it's stronger as a closet drama.
Aristotle, play cycle (post.)
The eight plays that make up Aristotle were also discovered at Hardiner Hollow (then The Maghreb). The shadowy Aristotle in the title is only rarely directly encountered in these individual plays, but his presence is very directly felt. In this contemporized Ancient Athens, we track Kronos as he dips in and around legendary and mythological histories of the Mediterranean.
(1) Janus – Kronos visits five first-day festivals from the days before Göbleki Tëpe's temple was carved to some point potentially past our own. (The fourth act seems to be a New Year's Eve during WWI, and the fifth is full of familiar phrases used in unfamiliar ways, and some new standard of measuring morals or ethics or values.)
This play is notable for Hardiner's only known treatment of Christianity—and one that's not likely to gain him all too many fans in the church. In the third act, Kronos travels to Bethlehem, where he finds the young (unnamed) Jesus, a spoiled brat using impossible powers indiscriminately. After the boy spoils the celebration by turning all the wine into blood, Kronos scolds the boy and gathers together great texts from across time for him to read: the Mahabharata and the Vedas, the works of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle (see what he did there?), the precepts of Ptah-Hotep, the Dao De Jing, Mayan and Aztec codices, and the Old and, yes, the New Testament of the Bible. The boy seems profoundly moved by the gift, and asks Kronos if he's his father. Kronos panics, truly unsure whether he can answer that question given his time-jumping lifestyle, and hops on to 1918 to try to avoid the issue altogether.
(2) Heads Up – Kronos decides to get a leg up in the next century by skipping across it to learn what disasters loom and what windfalls will blow in. He climbs Mount Olympus to observe from among the company of his fellow gods, only to learn that the century he's chosen will all but clear out his decadent company. This play skips across 20 scenes, beginning with Kronos climbing Olympus and ending with his descent at the end of the century; in between, the scenes jump in time, following Kronos as he flits back and forth within the century trying to fix the problems that brought his family so low. Hardiner doesn't specify exactly which century this is, but some of the scenes that Kronos observes on earth suggests that Hardiner placed the play around the time of Alexander's conquest: Kronos tries to "corrupt the flesh of this general, this horseback Oleander".
(3) Roots – A very sad Kronos travels back to shop the orchards of Demeter for his favorite fruit, the astraphallus (yes, Demeter calls it a starcock, but Kronos blushes when she does), before it goes extinct. When he's there, he meets a young titan named Prometheus, who is deeply frustrated with the vermin which have recently begun to stalk around the arcades to steal fruit. Kronos promises that any creature may be tamed if it is given the right gifts. Prometheus thinks he'll bring cooked food to the animals, but Kronos suggests that he cook the food in front of them so they can smell it in the air as they watch him tame the wild flame. The animals, of course, love the cooked food, but are more enamored of the fire—and before long, they've torched the gardens ("cooked them") and have armed themselves against the gentle gathered gods. (Naturally, the play again ends with the victorious humans coming to a flustered Kronos and asking if he is their father—and, naturally again, Kronos freaks out and pinks out of there before he gives any kind of straight answer.)
(4) Zas – This strange little Pinteresque piece asks for the actor playing Kronos to all of a sudden switch roles and play a character known as "Zas", whose action seems to be following after Kronos and erasing all mention of the god—obfuscating, lying, killing, and generally whitewashing all proofs of the divine out of history. This play deviates from the norm (we assume—unless this IS actually Kronos taking on a different guise and travelling across events that have and have not happened, yet, and when he returns to his identity as Kronos in the next play he forgets his own actions), and it is also significant for being Hardiner's only known attempt to put his theories about "functional verse" into practice. I will admit I'm the last person to try to explain functional verse, but consider the mathematical function and its transformative abilities: Hardiner's meter and rhyme schemes are constantly self-inflecting and shifting over the entirety of the piece. It's truly an astonishing effect when spoken aloud: the words take on the feeling in your mouth of a flashing school of fish, or birds changing direction as a flock mid-flight.
(5) The Harp – This time-hopping love story introduces Kronos to Rhea and is perhaps the most fluid of the plays. It has been staged on its own more than the other entries in Aristotle and gives us the only actual appearance of the philosopher. Kronos goes to Aristotle to ask for dating advice (apparently Aristotle got around, particularly with his students), and Aristotle sends him to collect Orpheus's harp. The adventure results in the death of Eurydice and Orpheus's voyage to the underworld, but Kronos pinks several centuries ahead in time (again, to avoid confrontation) to collect Orpheus's enchanted harp from the banks of a woodland stream. Rhea loves the gift of music, but when she learns the story of the harp, centuries later when the events happen in real-time for her, she leaves Kronos forever.
(6) Fatherhood – One of Kronos's quirkier characteristics is more or less explained here, as we learn that he's actually talking to the children he fathered with Rhea: in his stomach, his first daughter Hera asks to understand how her father experiences the world, so Kronos invents the book to represent his ability to flip back and forth through time. It's a kind of bedtime story in which we learn that Kronos can't remember his youth and can't seem to visit himself. At the end of the play, Rhea tells Kronos that she's pregnant again.
(7) Omphalos – The play begins with Kronos swallowing a stone he believes is his newborn son and... well... it gets almost as weird as Bhujarti. Kronos vomits up the Greek pantheon across time, also spitting up Buddhas and Hindu and Mayan deities and alien gods we know nothing about. There is a lot that's supposed to happen on the stage that might be considered unstageable, but a very lovely animated version by Rana Suveti has made the film festival circuit and is currently showing at the Hardiner museum at Hardiner Hollow. Oh: and where does Kronos puke up his offspring? A little place called Center Lake. One of his daughters calls herself the Wanderer. Strata Starvos from Candlewood...?
(8) Birthday – In this play, Kronos decides to kill himself, and he seeks the help of his brother Ophelion (or Apophis) in summoning a force that can actually put him down. I think this play is overlapping somewhat with Bhujarti here, because although that force is never named, it "crinkles all the seconds" of the aging god of time "into a point"—and causes the birth of Kronos, a crying baby that Apophis is supposed to "carry into the next room"... where, according to the stage directions, a new performance of Janus has begun with a new cast.
Needless to say, full productions of Aristotle are very rare, but director Robert Wilson has released a "sketchbook" of his production designs for his dream version of the cycle. The Robert Wilson version has not been staged.