WHAT'S a man to do when his wife suddenly announces, after a particularly difficult and dramatic confinement in a birthing pool in your living-room, that she wants you to bury the placenta beneath an oak tree and dance around it in New York's Central Park at dead of night?
Move out pretty quickly, perhaps?
Eventually, James Braly has done just that, leaving the marital home not so much because of the bizarre business with the placenta but more due to the fact that he's suffering from - among many other things - a s
urfeit of warlocks in his life.
Now, he's decided to reveal all about "20 years of monogamy in one terrifying evening".
A tall, gangling Richard Gere-type, with a shock of pewter-grey hair, this New York-based storyteller has turned his bizarre experiences of Life in a Marital Institution - the somewhat cringe-inducing title of an hysterically funny, often profoundly affecting one-man show he's bringing to Edinburgh - into a series of mesmerising stories. And they're all true.
Susan, his wife whom he's loved deeply since they were college sweethearts, knows all about his tell-all tales of their life together in the upstate New York city valley community and her wildly eccentric beliefs, but, not surprisingly perhaps, refuses to see him perform them.
The family moved to the community in 2004, so that Susan, who has a masters degree in divinity, might commune with like-minded individuals, people who admit at neighbourhood dinner parties that they do not bury their placenta at midnight but cook it with herbs and eat it.
"I know, you really could not make this stuff up," admits Braly, an amusing, laid-back man, when we meet in New York, where he stays during the week in the basement storage area of the Upper West Side building where he and his family - the couple have two sons, both of whom Susan has breast-fed even after they started school - used to live in some style and comfort. An accomplished storyteller, Braly once earned a small fortune writing effusive corporate speeches and he and his wife, who is of German extraction, lived in one of the ritziest apartment blocks in Manhattan, the sort of building where movie stars reside.
James, 46, who grew up in San Francisco, admits that he was far from satisfied with his career and the couple began questioning their lifestyle and family values. "We really didn't want to bring up two small children in the fractured society that is New York City today," he says. So he went along with his wife's suggestion that they should explore another way of living entirely.
"By this time, I was going to bed every night with a woman who had piles of books about leprechauns on her bedside table anyway," he says.
Susan found a small, open community north of New York, dedicated to biodynamic farming ("it's way beyond organic!"), led by one of the aforementioned, and particularly humourless, warlocks, where no-one ever locks their front doors or their cars, and where the crime figures number one unsolved case - "somebody stole a computer from a guidance counsellor, possibly an expelled student extracting revenge".
How big is the hamlet? "The population - do you want me to include the leprechauns? - is only a few hundred believers, most of whose underpinning is anthroposophy, the Rudolf Steiner spiritualistic doctrine and philosophy, about the knowledge of the nature of men and human wisdom, although I have to say that my wife is at the progressive edge. Not everyone there is a true believer in leprechauns and not everyone lets their children run around barefoot to strengthen their prehensile toes on the advice of the local podiatrist.
"Yet I have to say that there's a kind of nobility to what these people do," continues Braly. "Who knows whether what they believe is misguided or not? Maybe they know something I don't? One of the fundamental tenets on which the society is based is that it should be sustainable, so my wife refuses to allow batteries in the house. We've no TV, no radio, no CDs, no electric toys - only wooden ones - and no computers, although I use mine when I visit every weekend, and I drink coffee and wine, both of which are banned.
"It's all an experiment - and this is one of the dangers. My personal philosophy, my survival mechanism, is that this is a people-power house.
"'You're going to have fun. We're all going to have fun,' I tell my beloved boys, Oliver, eight, and Owen, six, when I go home to see them.
"By the time they emerge from this house, I hope that they'll have an unbelievable capacity to entertain themselves. So we have musical instruments - piano, guitars, everything! - and books.
As for the extended nursing of the boys - Owen is still being breast-fed- Braly says it's a hugely contentious issue. "Susan's theory is that if you satisfy their needs now, they won't be looking for substitutes later. To which, I respond that's all well and good, but I have my needs and this is all too much. Four of us in a bed! However, we're separated now, so we have different beds.
"I do try to take my own visceral repulsion temperature on this. Am I jealous?
Is it aesthetic? The women in the community who do this are not hot - in fact they are often morbidly obese," he agonises. "Susan isn't. But will she still be nursing the boys when they're teenagers? It's totally off the charts."
While Braly would defend to the death his 48-year-old wife's right to believe what she chooses to believe in, he says he can't cope with the fact she's completely lost her sense of humour.
"After we'd been in the community a couple of months, I began asking, 'What's wrong with this place?' I realised that they're all very, very earnest, especially the warlock. Therefore, it's not my path because to me, humour is bread - I can't survive without it. Now, Susan's furious if she thinks I'm making fun of her.
"I guess that doing the show has made me work through a lot of this crazy stuff, though, and to keep laughing at myself and with her.
"Parts of what Susan believes I'm OK with - the no-TV stuff, for instance. It's great to be in a house where the television set is not the altar."
The son of a Texan bomber pilot - "a very angry man indeed" - Braly says his own father stamped seething fury on him and he doesn't want to repeat that with his sons. "I'm often angrier inside than I appear to be outside. So I've had to think about boundaries I'm not going to cross about all of this," he confesses.
As for the placenta, it's still in the freezer, although it defrosted during the 2003 blackout in New York. "Susan hasn't buried it or cooked it yet," he says. "No way am I going to eat it."
He pauses and then confides: "I guess I've finally weaned myself off my pathological need for a happy ending. That saddens me, because ours was a very good marriage indeed. Now there are, to coin a phrase, three of us in it - Susan, me and a leprechaun."
• Life in a Marital Institution, Assembly, George Street, August 3-27.
The full article contains 1244 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
