A New Brain

Gordon Schwinn is a composer grinding out songs for a children's television show when he collapses at lunch and wakes up in a hospital with a malformation in his brain that will need surgery. The show follows him through the ward, with his mother, his boyfriend Roger and his friends around him, while he worries about dying with his real work unwritten. William Finn wrote it after his own hospital stay for the same condition, and it opened Off-Broadway at Lincoln Center Theater in 1998.