In his book, Sacks calls himself a theorist and a dramatist, and Brook could say the same. His company has played Shakespeare and Chekhov; a nine-hour Indian epic, ““The Mahabharata’’; ““Carmen’’ set in a bullring; a study of an African tribe, ““The Ik,’’ starving to extinction. In ““The Man Who,’’ Brook gets to the bedrock of pure human behavior. On a set with stark white furniture, four actors (the English Bruce Myers, the African Sotigui Kouyate, the Japanese Yoshi Oida, the German David Bennent) play a seeming stageful of patients and doctors. ““The Man Who’’ is a kind of tragicomic variety show, in which dysfunction becomes both heartbreaking and hilarious.
Kouyate plays a musician who tells how one day he reached for his wife, thinking she was a hat. Bennent is a man trapped in a chair, unable to move. ““Whose arm is this?’’ he panics. ““This is my mother’s. It’s stronger than mine.’’ Myers plays a ““ticcer,’’ a man with Tourette’s syndrome, which detonates his body into spasms of tics and compulsive obscene language. ““There’s a thunderstorm in my brain,’’ he says. Oida hears music in the middle of the night. They are songs from his past, evoking his childhood, before his parents died. ““I don’t want to be cured,’’ he says. ““I need these memories.’’ A doctor enters, gives him medication. The music fades.
These patients are oddball Oedipuses and calamitous Buster Keatons, inescapably reminding us of our own malfunctioning humanity. But why are there no women? Sacks writes about many women patients. The patient in his book who heard childhood music was in fact an Irish woman. The original workshop company was larger, including women. They decided they needed to observe real patients in hospitals. ““We needed a small commando unit,’’ says Brook. ““There was a natural selection. Those most committed were these four actors.’’ Raising the specter of political correctness, Brook rejects the idea of inserting a ““token’’ woman. But Brook, whose transcultural companies have always reflected the total human spectrum, might have assisted the ““natural selection’’ by making sure a woman filled out that spectrum. His addled Adams need an Eve.
That’s the one serious flaw in an exquisite piece of theater. In 100 minutes Brook and his superb actors find the human being buried and buffeted in the maelstrom of syndromes and symptoms. ““What day is today?’’ asks a doctor. ““Pedophilia,’’ replies the patient. Another patient sees a flower only as shapes of green and red until it’s placed in his hand. ““It’s a rose,’’ he says with a pure, quiet joy. Some have said that Sacks exploits his patients in his books. But he, and Brook in following him, have used the world of clinical dysfunction as a way of exploring the mysterious connections between brain and mind. Sacks the scientist and Brook the artist are necessary partners. Together they form ““the man who’’ must make the crucial synthesis between analysis and insight, organism and person.
