The City Of . . .
Matthew Capodicasa Playwright
Director Patrick Pearson
Yesenia Iglesias - Irene Nicklas Aliff - Arthur Scott Sedar - Z
This passage from Funes the Memorious, the haunting Jorge Luis Borges short story that served as the inspiration for this play, resonates deeply with me. I’m fascinated in the divide this play explores and how we process memory and truth: the danger of forgetting and the pain of remembering. “For nineteen years he had lived as one in a dream: he looked without seeing, listened without hearing, forgetting everything, almost everything.When he fell, he became unconscious; when he came to, the present was almost intolerable in its richness and sharpness, as were his most distant and trivial memories.” That’s the journey the characters, and we all, embark upon: how to see, hear and remember without getting overwhelmed by the almost instantaneous overload of information available. And given our current world in which the difference between real and fake can depend on who you choose to believe and not the actual facts themselves, it’s more important than ever that we all continue to pay attention and be fully aware, fully awake — be truly present in the moment. Patrick Pearson In The City Of…, the characters forget in front of us: but what have they forgotten? Did they notice? Did we notice?What have we missed in the telling? And who gets to tell these stories?Who gets to remember? And who gets to forget? Memory, for us, is fallible, after all.And yet, in this current moment, that fallibility is being exploited to rewrite history. We are told that our memories are wrong, that we’ve missed things, that what we remembered is not what happened. And certain basic tenets of our society seem to fall away because of it. In Funes the Memorious, an unnamed narrator recalls meeting a remarkable character in the countryside, a man who after an injury can remember literally everything he experiences.The story forces us to confront the usefulness and efficiency of memory: sure, Funes can remember an entire day from the past, perfectly, but it also takes him an entire day to do so. And his ability keeps him from the world. In the past year or so I’ve found myself returning to the writings of Jorge Luis Borges. Maybe it’s out of some strange sense of recognition. Borges’s stories, essays, and poetry depict worlds both dreamlike and frighteningly realistic; dip into tropes from genres both widely varied and yet to be named; and confront terrors from the realms of dreams, the physical, and the political. Matthew Capodicasa
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