The result is a work of profound emotion and reflection that explores vulnerability and the most oppressive of anxieties: the fear of being oneself.

At the age of twenty and after two summers of passion with a lover, Boris Nikitin announces to his loved ones that he is gay, thus voicing his truth to himself and others, against the conventions of the time. Almost fifteen years later, his father learns that he has ALS – a kind of sclerosis also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. In the face of this incurable disease that keeps him mentally lucid yet progressively paralyses him, the father must contend with his ever-declining body, which he had previously regarded as an efficient, finely tuned laboratory. He soon makes the decision to shorten the wait for death by resorting to assisted suicide. His decision – although it was not actually carried out – changed everything: the act of choosing death, going against his self and against convention, dispelled his fears and opened another path onto the rest of his life.

In their different ways, Nikitin and his father were both able to overcome social conditioning and share the unspoken, hidden desires and intimate truths. By relying on trust, they became vulnerable and thus human.

Boris Nikitin's text, which he began shortly after the death of his father, brings the two experiences together through their differences. Staging himself in a minimalistic set design, he creates a performance about what it means to break social taboos, to dare to step into the public sphere and, in so doing, to make oneself visible, vulnerable and open to attack. Attempt on Dying is a play about the gaze of others, overcoming the boundaries of shame and about the utopia of a vulnerability that would no longer be perceived as a weakness, but as a revolutionary power.