What’s inside your head? How does your gray matter direct your actions and shape your personality? These and other questions are raised by “The Man Who,” a short play by Peter Brook and Marie-H‚lŠne Estienne.

“The Man Who” is subtitled “A Theatrical Research,” in which the interactions between different doctors and patients are detailed in 17 short scenes. No names are used, and the characters are referred to only as Patient 1, Doctor 1, etc. All of the patients are afflicted with a different mental disorder. The titles of some of the scenes give some clues as to the mental disorder of the patient, such as Tourette’s, Visual Agnosi and Broca’s Aphasia. Others give no hint as to what the patient is suffering from, examples being Stimuli, Frontal Lobe 1, Negligence 1, and My Mother’s Arm.

As stated in the preface to the reader, the play purports to ask questions about our humanity as related to the physical matter of our being, namely our brains.

“If a man mistakes his wife for a hat, there must be a reason. Is he mad? The moment we lay aside this easy assumption, we face a real mystery.”

In the scene titled “The Man from La Rochelle,” the patient, when given instructions to say “La Rochelle” every time the doctor raises his hand, cannot remember the command after the first two times the doctor performs the test.

Presumably, he suffers from short-term memory loss, much like the main character in the movie “Memento.”

“The Dream” depicts a patient who thinks what she is experiencing is purely a dream, and the doctor is merely a character in the dream. The patient believes she will wake up eventually, but has been stuck in this dream for a very long time and wishes to be released into the real world every night before going to bed.

The patient in “Loss of Proprioception” is unable to move his body without looking and concentrating on the body part that needs to move.

“If I want to keep on my feet, I have to focus on a point on the wall to know that I am upright — even now when I am talking to you. And I can’t do two things at once. I can stand and hold something in my hand, but if I want to walk I’m forced to look at my legs.”

I found “The Man Who” to be more of an oddity than anything else. The idea of “theatrical research” struck me as interesting, and the melange of different stories within the play taught me a few things I hadn’t know before, such as the actual problems one has with Broca’s Aphasia.

Conceptually, the play comes across brilliantly, and surpassed the simple novelty of the concept to become a well-wrought story.

“The Man Who,” however, wasn’t a great read on its own. It is based off of a book by Oliver Sacks called “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.” Having not read that book, I believe, left me in the dark as to some of the allusions in the play.

I also had little clue as to what some of the afflictions described within were really about, such as Negligence 1, 2 and 3, but the play did spur me to mount some of my own investigations — always the sign of a good piece of art.

Though Brook and Estienne sufficiently convey the somewhat philosophical nature of the play set out at the beginning, there was much lacking in their delivery later on — some scenes left too many questions about the patients, making it hard to visualize and understand their suffering and the connection it had with their personality.

Brooks and Estienne wished to establish a “common ground” for their readers to interpret freely from, as stated in the preface:

“Today the great new subject of universal interest is the brain and we do not need to look far to discover why. Whatever the social and national barriers, we all have a brain and we think we know it.”

Ultimately, they stop short of their goal in the lackluster and overly clinical rendering of their characters; in other words, they sucked the humanity out of a play designed to question the origins and influences that make us human. “The Man Who” would probably be much, much better performed live than it is in book form.