Paging Nurse Ratched: In Jesi Bender’s latest, Kinderkrankenhaus, language itself is the problem.
Kinderkrankenhaus
Brick Theatre
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Through Sept. 30, 2023
White sheets. Six beds. Patients in unwashed gowns pace, cowed for fear of punishment. A new arrival enters.
The first thing they do is name you. Whatever moniker you’ve identified yourself with before your involuntary entry into the Kinderkrankenhaus is erased. The appellation you will go by during your stay is given to you by the other patients in you ward: Our principal character, played by Kayla Juntilla, is christened ‘Gnome,’ shown her bunk in the row of beds, given her rags, and told to await diagnosis.
In this opening salvo, this separation of name and diagnosis, Jesi Bender’s Kinderkrankenhaus lays naked its central theme: Language, taxonomy, and the various problems that are emergent from the abstract ordering of the world in the word.
In the next scene Gnome is diagnosed with “not being able to put the right words in the right order at the right time.”
The basic layout of the play is a familiar one: Cuckoo’s Nest, all the way down to a Nurse Ratched. It’s a genre piece in this way, Girl, Interrupted for frustrated logophiles, semiotics nerds, and post-Lacanians of all stripes.
The piece executes its premise by running through a highly enjoyable gamut of language games and words at a play. Most of the children in the hospital struggle with some form of Gnome’s problem — Nix, played by Shafer Gootkind, can’t hear a word without picking it apart entirely, etymologically fracturing everything to meaninglessness; Cinders, played by Nicholas Amodio, has got some many different languages swimming around in his head he struggles to distinguish what is true from what simply sounds the best; Eros, played by Joshua Cartagena, can’t get a thought past his impeded tongue; Python, played by Sydni Dichter, speaks in seeming random sequences of numbers, an oracular figure; and the Shadow, played by Tiana Richards, a repetitious mimic… As Cinders tells Gnome when she asks what’s wrong with all of them, herself included, “All sorts of things, bright gleaming things!”
There is, despite the horrors at the center of the play, a true joy in watching this small myriad of expression navigate itself. When the dread-inducing Dr. Schmetterling isn’t present onstage, the children in the asylum don’t seem to have much trouble dealing with each other. Their different modes of expression are accepted, an made kaleidoscopic. New words are learned, new systems created. Together these supposedly non-functioning children function just fine.
Later in the play, Gnome gives her own poetic diagnosis: “We are not mute minds, but timid tongues, twisted tongues!!” Here Bender’s games come to a halt and an ultimate conclusion is reached.
The conclusion is an ancient one, well-trodden and present in most wisdom traditions worldwide and across all time. Anyone familiar with these traditions, whether it be Gnosticism, Buddhism, the work of Wittgenstein, Daoism, Psychoanalysis, or the Torah, will recognize it: Language itself is the problem, it doesn’t serve to order the world, but instead conjures an abstract and inscrutable world of its own; most of our problems are because there is noise where there should be silence.
The BRICK theater, with partnerships between NYFA and Arts for Autism, has assembled an entire crew of neurodivergent folks to put this thing up — the whole case, backstage crew, everyone involved. Though the piece’s themes are universal, the problems of language and understanding, institutionalization and the idea of a “functioning individual” are made all the more real and clear when the very people most effected by the failures of these systems are the ones giving it voice.
