ABSTRACT

A Kind of Alaska was inspired by the neurologist Oliver Sacks’s compassionately written book Awakenings, detailing the extraordinary promise but only partial recovery offered to patients suffering from the sleeping sickness encephalitis lethargica. Pinter’s Deborah, a patient who has been awakened from a twenty-nineyear sleep, fractally dramatizes throughout the near impossibility not only of knowing the self but, in instances of neurological damage, of having a self at all. Deborah’s hopefully begun awakening, witnessed by her doctor Hornby (played by Pinter for a BBC radio broadcast) who has stood by her throughout, together with her sister Pauline, is followed by the disappointingly limited fulfillment of L-DOPA’s promise as a new drug. That limited, sometimes broken, promise of a psychiatric cure, reflected already in The Hothouse and The Caretaker, serves as a contemporary analog for the similar unfulfilled promise of almost all the major breakthrough psychiatric cures of the twentieth century (save lithium and perhaps Prozac): from electroshock therapy, lobotomy, and thorazine to the designer neuroleptic and psychotropic drugs which helped empty Western mental institutions in the nineteen sixties and seventies. Each new therapy, like L-DOPA, brought with it the promise of a miracle-briefly. But none are without side effects, sometimes as disturbing as the deficits they seek to address. What was astonishingly hopeful about L-DOPA’s promise was that after its initial administration patients awakened from a coma-like sleep often achieving a startling level of normality that momentarily made the drug appear to be indeed a miracle cure. But the miracle was short-lived: no patient ever again attained that level of normalcy, and a few were beset with Parkinsonian-like tics which were far less tolerable than the catatonia-like coma from which they

had emerged. As the world’s population ages, with many now living decades beyond the life expectancy of only a century ago, and as we witness the loss of “self” that currently can accompany old age’s diseases-Alzheimer’s, stroke, and senility-the questions raised in this play will take on a significance now primarily reserved for the beginnings of life: what does it mean to be human? On the surface Pinter’s play imaginatively telescopes the promise and disappointment of weeks and months into minutes to ask what it means to be a self when the self has slept through half a life. But more significantly, dramatizing the protean nature of identity, the play addresses the audience asking what constitutes a self and what it means to be awake to life.