Theatrical depictions of dementia (a blanket term for cognitive decline) are as old as Oedipus at Colonus and as familiar as King Lear or Death of a Salesman.  This talk, drawing on Chansky’s 2023 book Losing It: Staging the Cultural Conundrum of Dementia and Decline in American Theatre (Palgrave), discusses how scripted and staged representations of people living with dementia have morphed between 1913 and 2020 in accordance with medical findings, but, perhaps more importantly, with how such findings have seeped into public awareness–typically a few years after they have been laboratory breakthroughs.  Changes also occurred in accordance with emerging trends in dramaturgy, so that the kitchen sink realist “Old Age Home” in the 1913 Joint Owners in Spain bears little resemblance to the shape-shifting consciousness–rendered via changes in the arrangement of the setting to having actors switch roles, all to depict the cognitive shifts of the main character–in the 2014 The Father.

Dorothy Chansky is Emerita Professor in the School of Theatre and Dance at Texas Tech University.  Her other books include Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre (2015) and Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience (2004).  She is a past president of the American Theatre and Drama Society, a past editor of Theatre Annual, and a past Book Review Editor of Theatre Journal.  In 2024, she is teaching American drama at the University of Łódź (Poland) on a Fulbright Fellowship.