The Boston Globe features a beautiful article by Don Aucoin on the recent flurry of plays about victims of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. Among the plays he discusses are Bruce Graham’s The Outgoing Tide, Sharr White’s The Other Place, Barney Norris’s Visitors, and my own Absence. 

Given that Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia envelop their victims in a mental fog, it’s striking that Absence and other dramas depict it as a force for a certain kind of clarity, as the ailing protagonists strive for reconciliation with estranged family members. That impulse is crystallized in a line from Visitors, which will run Sept. 18-Oct. 10 at Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse, by an Alzheimer’s-afflicted woman who says to her son: “What if I died, and I still haven’t managed to have even one conversation with you?”