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.' 


Dorothy Chansky is a Professor in the School of Theatre and Dance at Texas Tech University, USA, where she is a President's Excellence in Research Professor. She was Founding Director of Tech's Humanities Center and a past President of the American Theatre and Drama Society as well as Vice President for Publications of the American Society for Theatre Research. Dorothy's previous publications include Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience (2004) and Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama on the American Stage (2015). She was editor of Theatre Annual: A Journal of Theatre and Performance of the Americas from 2011-2016 and is a former Book Review Editor of Theatre Journal. She is a current member of the Translation, Adaptation, and Dramaturgy Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research.