Hamlet remembers. Oedipus, with some help, remembers. A protagonist changes. Memory is essential for this. How, then, to represent a character who cannot remember and therefore cannot change? This has been the dramaturgical challenge of writing a play about H.M.

I structured the play as a weave of encounters. They are “glimpses,” meant to evoke rather than to explain. Some are from the scientific record while others are imagined. The weave has structural gaps in it which are intended to be filled in by you, the audience. I had a hunch, early in the writing process, that a theatrical remembrance of H.M. that honors its subject would necessarily require the audience to project their own associations and interpretations onto the event. The experience of memory and its lack is what holds this weave together.

Henry Molaison was a man with above-average intelligence. He had feelings and dreams. He could not remember whether or not the pants in his closet were his own, but I nevertheless had to assume that he had a complex and rich experience of his own life.

H.M.’s existential situation implicates all of us. His condition is both evident and opaque. Like the scientists who studied him, I too wanted to get inside H.M.’s head. But I could only gain access indirectly, through documentation, remembrances, data and, ultimately, through imagination and empathy. There were times when I envied him and times when his condition truly terrified me. My time with H.M. has been a rich, though not always welcome, encounter with my own fragile hold on memory, perception and identity.

Yesterday Happened: Remember H.M. is remembering a fundamental and mysterious part of ourselves.