About the work
Lukas Bärfuss wrote his first full-length play in 2003; the premiere took place the same year at the Theater Basel under Barbara Frey. The work brought the Swiss author international recognition and has since been translated into more than twenty languages. Bärfuss treats a taboo subject with unsentimental clarity: the question of whether people with intellectual disabilities have a right to their own sexuality.
Plot
Dora, a young woman with an intellectual disability, is kept calm and compliant under medication. When her parents stop the medication, not only her personality awakens but also her sexual desire. She enters relationships, becomes pregnant, makes her own decisions — and in doing so overwhelms those around her. The parents, the employer, the doctor all want to protect and control her at once. In the end the question is left open: may self-determination be granted at all, if it does not conform to the notions of the so-called healthy?
Cultural significance
Die sexuellen Neurosen unserer Eltern is regarded as one of the most important German-language contemporary plays of the 2000s and was honoured with numerous prizes, among them the Mülheim Dramatists' Prize. Bärfuss turns the inclusion debate on its head: instead of asking how to adapt disabled people to society, he asks whether society even has the maturity to bear its own complacency. The play is performed regularly at German-language stages and belongs to the standard repertoire of contemporary drama.