Kinderkrankenhaus

Kinderkrankenhaus
by Jesi Bender
September 28-30, 2023

Inside the grey walls of a hospital children are been given diagnoses they don’t understand. The doctor tells them to fix their ills, or face the consequences.  Kinderkrankenhaus explores neurodiversity, the pathologizing of difference, and the complexity of labels in a world where the unspeaking are seen as unthinking. Can the children persevere in a place where they are forced to conform?

Kinderkrankenhaus is an experimental play that explores neurodiversity, deficiency paradigms, and deconstructionism. As a parable about medical models of disability, children are gathered inside a mental hospital. They are told they need to ‘get better’, or else. Without any clue as to why they’re ‘sick’ in the first place, the children struggle with language and eventually pull apart meaning until they are free from its burden. Dark and challenging, Kinderkrankenhaus is heavily leaden with wordplay and semantics and rooted in real, often-unseen histories, including Nazi euthanasia programs. Characters represent different neurodivergent archetypes; such as echolalia, info-dumping, a character who is literal, another who is anything but – and all of them drawing extraordinary associations. At its heart, Kinderkrankenhaus is about the tension at the heart of language’s utility and malleability.