Questions for Will

The following is excerpted from a December 2012 email exchange between Will and Art.

What role does Agniesczka play?  

I don't foresee getting an actress to play her.  At most, we might need some old photographs, but even those could be of her and the kids.   

In the old days, Arthur wasn't around much or there wasn't any reason for her to end up in the band footage, so she is mostly just alluded to in the narrative.  In the present day, she is dead or otherwise gone.   

I do hope for a day when we turn the whole story into a musical; at that point, neither of us will play our roles, so we can develop her role more fully then--and that of Will's girlfriend Linda--when there's no need for us to do the acting.  Will spends most of his life in the future and Arthur has a really tenuous relationship with chronological time, so I don't see either of them as big picture takers.

Why would Will use marriage to control Arthur?  

Will is torn between his Polish roots and his New World roots.   

His New World roots can only think in terms of being a swinging single: initially, he tempts Arthur into forming The Sweet World through women.   

He feels guilty about that when he sees how that path nearly destroyed him, so he turns to the Old World alternative: marriage. Will can't think in terms of celibacy, which is what Arthur really needs.  But if Arthur becomes a monk or hermit, he can't be a rock star.  Plus, celibacy just seems to weird and unnatural to a modern man like Will.   

So Will wants to make amends (here again is how we keep Will from wearing a black top hat and twirling his mustache).  Will took a vow that he would make his brother a star. His approach in the Sweet World failed, so he tries another approach, grounded in a very Polish vision of stability (marriage and church) as well as a 70's vision (psychology, counseling, support groups, settling down).   

I think Will feels that if Arthur has stability at home, he can compartmentalize and be a husband and father by day and a rock star by night.  Initially, Arthur sings about domestic bliss, but soon he feels called to subjects like confessing his guilt and the state of America's soul.   

As Arthur comes closer to singing about the things he feels called to sing about, his marriage, band, and relationship with his brother deteriorate.  Will sees everything that he tried to build for Arthur falling apart and resents him for it.  Will can only think in terms of real-world responsibilities, and here's Arthur chasing ghosts while the woods are burning.  

The ECT is a combination of revenge, resentment, a quest for control, love for his brother, and fear that his brother may be right and that everything Will has pursued is wrong. 

Will's hamartia is a type of misguided nobility.  If you want to go as far as a lobotomy, we can; I think he does need to be permanently scarred from his institutionalization, but ECT might be enough.  The treatment severs his ability to easily distinguish between past, present, and future, real and mystical, word and deed.  His capacity to distinguish what is reality the way other people perceive it and what is his own mystical connection to God was never strong to begin with, but it's gone now.   

Will is too salt of the earth to get that, and he just sees crazy.  Joe will figure it out, though, and help Arthur reenter the world.