How to live so that you don't put a bullet through your head before you're fifty? This was the starting point of a speech for students ('This is water') by the American writer David Foster Wallace. Three years later, at forty-six years old, he hung himself with a garden hose in his garage.
With three companies – de KOE, De Nwe Tijd and Hof van Eede – we're making the same number of plays about the character and work of David Foster Wallace. DAVID of hoe we ons bedacht hebben ('David or how we changed our minds'), part one of this trilogy, has its premiere in season 2021-2022. This summer we would like to share our first texts with you: welcome in the writer's room!
We start off from the biography of David Foster Wallace – addiction, genius, insecurity, depression, hyperconsciousness – but also want to ask questions about how to have a biography. How it affects you to tell someone else your life's story. Probably, we want to write about how to live a meaningful life, a coherent life, a life in which you are connected with others and with the worlds, so that you can make it to fifty without shooting yourself in the head. Or without hanging yourself in your garage, four years before that deadline.