Losing It : Staging the Cultural Conundrum of Dementia and Decline in American Theatre

This monograph is a study of American (U.S.) stage representations of dementia mounted between 1913 and 2019. Its imbricated strands are playtexts; audiences as both the targets of the productions (artifacts in the marketplace) and as anticipated determinants of legibility; and medical science, both as has been (and is) known to researchers and, more importantly, as it has been (and is) known to educated general audiences. As the Baby Boom generation finds itself solidly in the category of “Senior,” interest in plays that address personal and social issues around cognitive decline as a potentially frightening and expensive experience, no two iterations of which are identical, have, understandably, burgeoned. This study shines a spotlight on eleven dementia plays that have been produced in the United States over the past century, and seeks, in the words of medical humanities scholar Anne Whitehead, to “open up, and to hold open , central ethical questions of responsiveness, interpretation, responsibility, complicity and care.” Acknowledgements 6 Contents 8 List of Figures 10 Part I Orientation 12 1 Introduction 13 Organization of the Book 19 Notes 24 2 Dementia, Alzheimer’s, Age: Intersectionalities and an American Context 29 Notes 40 3 Bodies in the Audience/Bodies Onstage: Intersectionalities 47 Notes 58 Part II Social Insecurity 62 4 Walk-On: Joint Owners in Spain 63 Joint Owners: Dramaturgy and Depictions 64 Dementia In Situ 67 Critical Reception(s) 70 Ladies First. Or Last. 74 Notes 80 5 Supporting Role: All the Living 85 The Moment/The Medicine/The Men 87 Dramatization and Its Discontents 91 Reading Embodiment 97 The Next Steps 103 Notes 107 6 Willy Loman Center Stage 112 Doctors’ Dilemmas 114 Seeing Is Believing/Believing Is Seeing 118 Home. Free. 127 Notes 129 Part III Taking It Personally 134 7 From the Inside 135 Brain Crash7 137 “I Am an Archive”60 148 Notes 156 8 Inside (and) Out: “Who Exactly Am I?”—The Father 163 Notes 171 Part IV Human. Resources. 174 9 Memory. Loss. Or, Understanding Memory (for Dummies) 175 Understanding Memory (for Dummies) 179 Notes 187 10 Family Affairs 191 Sign on the Dot(ty)ed Line 191 Brief Me on This 204 Notes 210 11 Ready for Prime Time: Marjorie Prime 217 Notes 225 12 Cellular Data 228 Cellular Data on the Public’s Radar 231 Notes 240 13 No. Regrets. 244 Wav(erly)ing Goodbye 244 Humans. Resources. 258 Notes 271 14 Who Cares? 277 Notes 283 Works Cited 285 Index 314