When Young Playwrights Are Kept Awake Because of History: Cultural Memory and Amnesia in Recent American Plays

Abstract Borrowing from both a painting and the retrospective exhibition of David Wojnarowicz, History Keeps Me Awake at Night, this paper targets two recent American plays: Annie Baker’s The Flick (2013) and Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance (2018). In both, the playwrights point to the neglect of history, or rather cultural memory, as I will insist on calling it, as one of the ills affecting a “historicidal” society such as that of the United States. An immersion into the present and concurrent obliteration of one’s cultural inheritance results in a populace easily manipulated in the interests of corporate control, and more importantly for the plays under consideration, into unhappiness and disconnection, an erlebnis, in sum, which proves lethal for individuals and the larger groups of which they form part. Both plays further seem to argue that the most troublesome of such a thing is how little consciousness of the problem there is, a surefire indication that induced amnesia is making alarming headway among the younger generations.