Night Sky (play)

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Night Sky is a 1991 play by Susan Yankowitz, which originally premiered in New York starring Joan MacIntosh, under the direction of Joseph Chaikin, whose personal struggles with stroke and aphasia were the original inspiration for the play. It was later produced Off-Broadway in a revised version under the direction of Daniella Topol and featuring Jordan Baker in the main role. [1]

Contents

Plot

The play is set in modern times, and theatrically explores what Dr. Stephen Hawking called the two mysteries remaining to us: the brain and the cosmos.

Anna, a brilliant and articulate astronomer, has her sights set on a promising academic career. However, her life is suddenly turned upside-down when she is struck by a car and develops aphasia. Without the ability to effectively communicate, as a "hodge-podge of unconnected words alternately confusing, funny, original and wise – and sometimes all four" becomes her normal pattern of speech, Anna's life becomes increasingly more difficult, in dealing with her lover, a teen-aged daughter, and attempting to continue her professional career. [1]

However, her condition isn't completely irreversible, and it is the process of Anna's harrowing recovery that is the heart of the story. Along the way, the audience also encounters another aphasia patient, Anna's therapist, and other individuals who misunderstand her condition, all as Anna tries to recover and to deliver her research paper at a prestigious conference in Paris. [2]

Characters

Background

Yankowitz was inspired and commissioned to write the play that would become Night Sky after her friend and mentor, legendary director Joseph Chaikin, suffered a stroke during heart surgery and developed aphasia. Chaikin eventually recovered, but the experience affected him and his friends forever, and he desired to educate people about this very devastating condition. Yankowitz recalled how "When he would go out in public—similar to what I showed in the play—people would assume he was an idiot, he didn't understand anything. For somebody of Joe's outstanding intelligence and previous eloquence, it was just a horrible situation." Yankowitz uses these type of situations in her play.

However, Chaikin wanted to distance himself somewhat from the play, so he gave Yankowitz three conditions: the play's protagonist was to be a woman, not a man, and he wanted the aphasia to develop due to an automobile accident instead of a stroke or surgery. The third condition, which surprised Yankowitz, was that the protagonist should be an astronomer. When asked why, Chaikin replied, "'Stars, stars. So many stars.' And he made a gesture, pointing above. I said, 'Yes, but what about them?' He couldn't find the words to express it." [3]

Related Research Articles

Aphasia Inability to use spoken language

Aphasia is an inability to comprehend or formulate language because of damage to specific brain regions. The major causes are a cerebral vascular accident (stroke) or head trauma. Aphasia can also be the result of brain tumors, brain infections, or neurodegenerative diseases, but the latter are far less prevalent.

Expressive aphasia Language disorder involving inability to produce language

Expressive aphasia, also known as Broca's aphasia, is a type of aphasia characterized by partial loss of the ability to produce language, although comprehension generally remains intact. A person with expressive aphasia will exhibit effortful speech. Speech generally includes important content words but leaves out function words that have more grammatical significance than physical meaning, such as prepositions and articles. This is known as "telegraphic speech". The person's intended message may still be understood, but their sentence will not be grammatically correct. In very severe forms of expressive aphasia, a person may only speak using single word utterances. Typically, comprehension is mildly to moderately impaired in expressive aphasia due to difficulty understanding complex grammar.

Hemiparesis, or unilateral paresis, is weakness of one entire side of the body. Hemiplegia is, in its most severe form, complete paralysis of half of the body. Hemiparesis and hemiplegia can be caused by different medical conditions, including congenital causes, trauma, tumors, or stroke.

Receptive aphasia Language disorder involving inability to understand language

Wernicke's aphasia, also known as receptive aphasia, sensory aphasia or posterior aphasia, is a type of aphasia in which individuals have difficulty understanding written and spoken language. Patients with Wernicke's aphasia demonstrate fluent speech, which is characterized by typical speech rate, intact syntactic abilities and effortless speech output. Writing often reflects speech in that it tends to lack content or meaning. In most cases, motor deficits do not occur in individuals with Wernicke's aphasia. Therefore, they may produce a large amount of speech without much meaning. Individuals with Wernicke's aphasia are typically unaware of their errors in speech and do not realize their speech may lack meaning. They typically remain unaware of even their most profound language deficits.

Brain damage Destruction or degeneration of brain cells

Neurotrauma, brain damage or brain injury (BI) is the destruction or degeneration of brain cells. Brain injuries occur due to a wide range of internal and external factors. In general, brain damage refers to significant, undiscriminating trauma-induced damage, while neurotoxicity typically refers to selective, chemically induced neuron damage.

Anomic aphasia Medical condition

Anomic aphasia is a mild, fluent type of aphasia where individuals have word retrieval failures and cannot express the words they want to say. Anomia is a deficit of expressive language. Anomia is a symptom of all forms of aphasia, but patients whose primary deficit is word retrieval are diagnosed with anomic aphasia. Some level of anomia is seen in all of the aphasias. Individuals with aphasia who display anomia can often describe an object in detail and maybe even use hand gestures to demonstrate how the object is used, but cannot find the appropriate word to name the object. Patients with anomic aphasia have relatively preserved speech fluency, repetition, comprehension, and grammatical speech.

Anosognosia is a condition in which a person with a disability is cognitively unaware of having it due to an underlying physical condition. Anosognosia results from physiological damage to brain structures, typically to the parietal lobe or a diffuse lesion on the fronto-temporal-parietal area in the right hemisphere, and is thus a neuropsychiatric disorder. A deficit of self-awareness, it was first named by the neurologist Joseph Babinski in 1914. Phenomenologically, anosognosia has similarities to denial, which is a psychological defense mechanism; attempts have been made at a unified explanation. Anosognosia is sometimes accompanied by asomatognosia, a form of neglect in which patients deny ownership of body parts such as their limbs. The term is from Ancient Greek ἀ- a-, 'without', νόσος nosos, 'disease' and γνῶσις gnōsis, 'knowledge'. It is also considered a disorder that makes the treatment of the patient more difficult, since it may affect negatively the therapeutic relationship.

Conduction aphasia Medical condition

Conduction aphasia, also called associative aphasia, is an uncommon form of difficulty in speaking (aphasia). It is caused by damage to the parietal lobe of the brain. An acquired language disorder, it is characterised by intact auditory comprehension, coherent speech production, but poor speech repetition. Affected people are fully capable of understanding what they are hearing, but fail to encode phonological information for production. This deficit is load-sensitive as the person shows significant difficulty repeating phrases, particularly as the phrases increase in length and complexity and as they stumble over words they are attempting to pronounce. People have frequent errors during spontaneous speech, such as substituting or transposing sounds. They are also aware of their errors and will show significant difficulty correcting them.

Joseph Chaikin

Joseph Chaikin was an American theatre director, actor, playwright, and pedagogue.

Transcortical sensory aphasia (TSA) is a kind of aphasia that involves damage to specific areas of the temporal lobe of the brain, resulting in symptoms such as poor auditory comprehension, relatively intact repetition, and fluent speech with semantic paraphasias present. TSA is a fluent aphasia similar to Wernicke's aphasia, with the exception of a strong ability to repeat words and phrases. The person may repeat questions rather than answer them ("echolalia").

Landau–Kleffner syndrome (LKS)—also called infantile acquired aphasia, acquired epileptic aphasia or aphasia with convulsive disorder—is a rare childhood neurological syndrome.

Primary progressive aphasia Medical condition

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a type of neurological syndrome in which language capabilities slowly and progressively become impaired. As with other types of aphasia, the symptoms that accompany PPA depend on what parts of the left hemisphere are significantly damaged. However, unlike most other aphasias, PPA results from continuous deterioration in brain tissue, which leads to early symptoms being far less detrimental than later symptoms. Those with PPA slowly lose the ability to speak, write, read, and generally comprehend language. Eventually, almost every patient becomes mute and completely loses the ability to understand both written and spoken language. Although it was first described as solely impairment of language capabilities while other mental functions remain intact, it is now recognized that many, if not most of those afflicted suffer from impairment of memory, short term memory formation and loss of executive functions. It was first described as a distinct syndrome by M.‑Marsel Mesulam in 1982. Primary progressive aphasias have a clinical and pathological overlap with the frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) spectrum of disorders and Alzheimer's disease. However, PPA is not considered synonymous to Alzheimer's disease due to the fact that, unlike those affected by Alzheimer's disease, those with PPA are generally able to maintain the ability to care for themselves, remain employed, and pursue interests and hobbies. Moreover, in diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, Pick's disease, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, progressive deterioration of comprehension and production of language is just one of the many possible types of mental deterioration, such as the progressive decline of memory, motor skills, reasoning, awareness, and visuospatial skills.

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Dysprosody, which may manifest as pseudo-foreign accent syndrome, refers to a disorder in which one or more of the prosodic functions are either compromised or eliminated completely.

Jargon aphasia is a type of fluent aphasia in which an individual's speech is incomprehensible, but appears to make sense to the individual. Persons experiencing this condition will either replace a desired word with another that sounds or looks like the original one, or has some other connection to it, or they will replace it with random sounds. Accordingly, persons with jargon aphasia often use neologisms, and may perseverate if they try to replace the words they can not find with sounds.

Spontaneous recovery is a phenomenon of learning and memory that was first named and described by Ivan Pavlov in his studies of classical (Pavlovian) conditioning. In that context, it refers to the re-emergence of a previously extinguished conditioned response after a delay. Such a recovery of "lost" behaviors can be observed within a variety of domains, and the recovery of lost human memories is often of particular interest. For a mathematical model for spontaneous recovery see Further Reading.

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References

  1. 1 2 Samuel French, Inc. The House of Plays & Musical Plays for Over 175 Years
  2. "Susan Yankowitz's 'Night Sky' explores the cosmos and the human brain". NY Daily News. Retrieved 2012-07-14.
  3. "Talkin' Broadway – What's New on the Rialto? – Susan Yankowitz – 6/10/09". Talkinbroadway.com. 2009-06-20. Retrieved 2012-07-14.