Other Places (A Kind of Alaska)

The actress Cate Blanchett is going to direct the Harold Pinter play "A Kind of Alaska" according to The Carpetbagger, (NY Times blogger who reviews films here) in Sydney, Australia, a country suffering its worst drought in 1000 years. It was put on by the Manhattan Theater Club (in 1984 See Diane Wiest in it here.) In the book description, there is an indirect interesting reference to the Bronx Psychiatric Hospital (I think) that Allen Ginsberg was once in for a short time, over marijuana I think, where Dr. Sacks was who I once listened to his travels to the island of "color blindness" in the Pacific on an audio tape. Today the now former hospital it is becoming part of a high-tech center. From the Amazon Book view here. "A Kind of Alaska was inspired by Awakenings by Oliver Sacks M.D., first published in 1973 by Gerald Duckworth and Co." "In the winter of 1916-17, there spread over Europe, and subsequently over the rest of the world, an extraordinary epidemic illness which presented itself in innumerable forms - as delirium, mania, trances, coma, sleep, insomnia, restlessness, and states of Parkinsonism. It was eventually identified by the great physician Constatin von Economo and named by him encephalitis lethargica, or sleeping sickness." "Over the next ten years almost five million people fell victim to the disease of whom more than a third died. Of the survivors some escaped almost unscathed, but the majority moved in states of deepening illness. The worst-affected sank into singular states of 'sleep' - conscious of their surroundings but motionless, speechless, and without hope or will, confined to asylums or other institutions." "Fifty years later, with the development of the drug L-DOPA, they erupted into life once more."