about
 

Emil Kraepelin was the doctor who, during the Twenties, named as “Alzheimer disease” the form of dementia senilis discovered and theorized by his colleague Alois Alzheimer.

The three persons who appear in this play are an Alzheimer sufferer, his son and his doctor. The First Man is losing his memory, and tries to remember a detail in his life happened in the past, during a war. The Second Man and Third Man try to discover what has marked him so deeply, that comes to surface as an obsession at the end of his life.

Anyway, this is not properly a play about Alzheimer disease. The idea at the base of this play is the attempt to face the problem of the reconstruction of a story in both levels: as on the one of the content (for the characters), as on the one of the form (for the spectators). An Alzheimer sufferer often names persons with different names; he changes the roles they have had in his life; he misunderstands the function of objects; he confuses ages and years. In his memory, real and imagined details cohabit without problems. These imagined details break into the past from the present: a newspaper article, the television news, a painting hanging in the living room. How does the mind of an Alzheimer sufferer work? Which kind of associative processes does it follow in the “semantization” of words? In which way imagination influences memory? How can an Alzheimer sufferer maintain his identity, when his memory and his story are not stable and defined anymore?

The identity of a person - as the one of a nation: Europe, for example - is structured on memory, on the possibility to maintain logic coherence in the chain that connects events. 

This play tries to face these problems as formal-dramatic problems too. The play is dis-organized in different fragments, as they could appear in the mind of a person who suffers Alzheimer and loses his identity. Some of the fragments could be seen as temporal consequent, some others cannot, and they present themselves as alternative each other. Some of them repeat themselves, some others sharply interrupt. The play tries to follow the degenerative process that takes place in the mind of the Alzheimer sufferer: as the text goes on, words loose little by little their signify, and they are replaced with images, those do not “signify” something, but “suggest” something.

In this way the spectators, as the characters, are called upon to formulate hypothesis of reconstruction of the story, in a free game of interpretations, to build up a truth that could only be uncertain.