This unsettling and absorbing play considers the dark powers of language—how it can be used as a tool of suppression and othering—and what freedom from linguistic rules and strictures, and perhaps from language itself, might make possible. The exploration of these powers and possibilities is both chilling and revelatory.
The play is set at the eponymous Kinderkrakenhaus, a hospital for children, “in an unknown time and unknown geography.” The newest patient, Gnome, has no idea why they’ve been hospitalized, although a more apt description might be imprisoned. Gnome and the other children are trapped within the grey walls of the institution, under the watch of a Dr. Dorothy Schmetterling, who is more interested in enforcing rules among the children than in offering them anything resembling care.
Dr. Schmetterling is intent on labeling the children and what she perceives as their ills. This echoes the real-world drive in medicine to determine and name diagnoses, which can result in individuals being defined by a diagnosis and, in the worst cases, othered by it. Throughout the play, Dr. Schmetterling seems to enjoy the power that such labeling—and its more troubling potentials and cruelties—grants her. During one exchange, in which Gnome (rightfully) questions the doctor’s description of the diagnostic process and the language surrounding it, Dr. Schmetterling grows frustrated, eventually exclaiming, “You seem to not be able to understand what is appropriate and what is not appropriate.”
Dr. Schmetterling: “No, you don’t. I would say that you exhibit what is called deviant social behaviors and an inability to to relate to your peers. Do you understand?”
Gnome: “No.”
Part of “proper” behavior, according to Dr. Schmetterling, is following linguistic conventions. She tells Gnome that “it would be good for you to think about how you use your words and how you are choosing to behave. How we use our words is important. … You have to use them carefully and correctly in order to fit in.” She seems to regard Gnome and the other children—and their inability to conform to her rules regarding behavior and language—as hopeless. This judgment is deeply troubling, because it soon becomes clear that patients who don’t learn to conform are sent to a far worse destination than the hospital. In Dr. Schmetterling’s words, “It is deep and it is dark and it is an absence forever.”
Paradoxically, the patient who is perhaps the biggest rule breaker at the hospital, and who therefore seems to be most in danger, also appears to have the most freedom, in a certain sense—a freedom of the mind if not of the body. This patient is Python, who lives in a cave in the wall of the other children’s living space. Although mostly silent, Python now and then speaks in what appears to be a code, consisting of numbers and occasional words, and representing a form of expression that’s unrestrained by Dr. Schmetterling’s dictates. Python is preternaturally wise, according to Cinders, the oldest patient at the hospital. As Cinders tells Gnome, “Python knows more than you do. Or me. Anyone here. I’ve seen Python read the future we carry in our skin. Read invisible things. Like time.”
Of course, Dr. Schmetterling thinks that Python is the opposite of wise, believing that Python’s strings of numbers and words must be “nonsense,” and that there can be no meaning or intelligence in any expressions that don’t follow her precepts.
At an especially disturbing juncture of the play, we learn that the hospital appears to be trading in eugenics. A letter from something known as a Eugenics Record Office, discovered by one of the children, suggests that patients deemed to have “unworthy lives” are deserving of death. This parallels the rationale in Nazi Germany for murdering thousands of people considered mentally or physically “unfit” to live.
When the children consider a word from the letter, “unwertes” (“unworthy”), Cinders says, “You know we don’t have to take their name. You only take it if you really own it.” (Here, “name” might refer to “unwertes” or to the children’s names. Gnome, for one, seemed to have been given their name by the institution.)
Cinders, strongly: “Where the proper word does not exist, when it gets lost or hidden, you make a new one. You take it in your hands and you give it a name. And then you add it to all possibilities of understanding.”
In this scene and others, the children try to reclaim words and the power of naming, and to push back against the strictures placed upon them by Dr. Schmetterling and other interests that seek to control them, and worse. In one confrontation with Dr. Schmetterling, Gnome even rejects the primacy of words as “acceptable” means of expressing one’s thoughts. Gnome tells her, “Speech … words are the last things that should show you what is inside a mind.”
Later, Gnome and Cinders consider what an existence “outside of language” might look like.
Getting back to the purported mission of the hospital, it becomes clear that the “sickness” that Dr. Schmetterling claims to wish to treat lies in her own views and in the judgments of society at large, not in the children at Kinderkrankenhaus. To the extent that these children are broken, it is the hospital and society that are responsible for this harm. As Cinders tells Gnome at one point, “It’s not about you. It’s all in how others read you. That’s what makes you ill. You see, your body is the word and your actions are the grammar. Too bad that what you mean to say and what people understand are two different things.”
This observation is so true, and so beautifully stated, and it might also apply to real-world misperceptions of the neurodivergent and of others who are dismissed or dehumanized in certain situations or sectors of society. Like the rest of this inventive and thought-provoking play, it opens up new ways of examining and responding to these misperceptions.
Would My Pick be Your Pick?
If you're interested in ________, the answer may be "Yes":￭ Nonconformist or experimental literature
￭ Critical explorations of language
￭ Neurodiversity, and discrimination against the neurodivergent
