Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
✭✭✩✩✩
by Diane Flacks, directed by Richard Greenblatt
Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
January 14-February 15, 2015
Brenda: “God is a pigeon and we’re statues”
Diane Flacks’s new play Waiting Room presents the viewer with a major paradox. Half of the play is a well-observed study of what it is like for parents waiting every day in a hospital for news of changes in the condition of their critically ill child. The other half of the play is an extraordinarily preposterous tale of a surgeon for that child who breaks all the rules, including those of credulity, to try to cure himself of a debilitating disease. Since the two stories are interleaved, a viewer constantly has to switch attention from the engaging plight of the parents to the far-fetched doings of the surgeon. In presenting both stories Flacks fatally undermines what might have been a moving portrait of how parents cope with the loss of control over their child’s fate.
Set in a hospital similar to, if not identical with Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, Chrissie (Michelle Monteith) and Jeremy (Jordan Pettle) are already emotionally exhausted as they wait to hear the outcome of surgery on their little girl’s cancerous brain tumour. Andre (Ari Cohen), a brilliant surgeon with limited interpersonal skills, takes less than a minute to tell the parents the outcome was successful. When they beg for more information, he breaks into a description in medical terminology which is equally unhelpful. The only person Chrissie and Jeremy can talk to is Brenda (Jane Spidell), whose son survived after similar surgery. Brenda is back in the waiting room because her now teenaged son has fractured his skull falling off his motorbike. It happens that the child of Chrissie and Jeremy comes to face a more complicated situation.
Parallel to the stories of the parents in the waiting room that designer Kelly Wolf has situated stage left, is the story of the surgeon in an office stage right. Andre is in the midst of an affair with a pediatrician Melissa (Jenny Young). Sensing that something was wrong with himself, he secretly had a series of MRI scans done of his brain over a period of weeks. He shows them to Melissa as evidence that he has early onset Alzheimer’s disease, and he wants her help in secretly administering an experimental drug that may halt the disease’s progress. Knowing that Andre’s plan is not only risky but completely unethical, Melissa still agrees to help him. Their problems get worse when the Clinical Director Dr. Aayan (Warona Setshwaelo) finds out what Andre is doing.
In her Playwright’s Note, Flacks states that the play is inspired by her own nine-month period sitting in the waiting room at Sick Kids while her son was undergoing treatment. This is probably why there is such a ring of truth to Flacks’s portrayal of how Chrissie, Jeremy and Brenda all deal with their helplessness. Flacks says, “Waiting Room is not my family’s story. Its characters and events are fictitious and constructed for drama.” The second sentence is quite an understatement. I attended the play with a person who has been a surgeon at Sick Kids for 27 years. He told me that while Flacks’s portrayal of the parents is just right, not one aspect of her portrayal of the doctors bears any relation to reality.
First, there is no way for anyone to have an MRI scan done secretly or anonymously. Other people have to operate the machine. Even if a doctor wanted to have an MRI scan done of himself, he cannot requisition it himself, but would have to have his own doctor order it. All MRI scans have the patient’s name on the scan, so when Dr. Aayan sees Andre’s scans on Melissa’s computer, she would also see the name. Flacks portrays Andre as both a neurosurgeon and an oncologist. The training for either takes so long that a person would be one or the other but not both. Flacks simply wants Andre to be able to speak to Chrissie and Jeremy in both capacities, no matter how unrealistic that may be. If Andre saw from MRI scans that he already had early onset dementia, he would know that he would have to resign immediately. Andre is already in a state where there is no time for him to get well enough to work. For helping Andre, Melissa would have her license taken away and not be allowed to continue as a researcher as happens in the play. There is no such position in a hosptial as a “Clinical Director” who routinely intercedes in another doctor’s work.
Flacks even gets the doctors’ interactions with the patients wrong. Doctors should not tell parents diagnoses or surgical outcomes in a waiting room or other public place. Why? Patient confidentiality – a notion Flacks is aware of. When discussing palliative care, the team would have already had a session to agree on an approach before meeting the parents, thus preventing the row between doctors that Flacks depicts. No such meeting would proceed without both parents present, unlike what Flacks shows. And it would not happen in the waiting room. Why? Patient confidentiality. Obviously, confounding what can and cannot takes place in the waiting room may be dramatically convenience, but it grossly misrepresents hospital protocol. Greenblatt has the stage re-set for a grieving room. Why not re-set the waiting room as a conference room when needed where doctors can discuss their patients in private.
It appears that Flacks wants her play to be realistic, otherwise she would not lard it with medical and hospital jargon. She clearly had help getting the language right. Why did she not seek help to get hospital and medical protocols correct? Aristotle observed long ago that drama has to be about what is probable, not possible. Yet, Flacks’s portrayal of hospital life goes beyond the improbable to include the impossible. She will win people over on an emotional level with the parents’ story, but even an ordinary person will recognize how far-fetched her scenario is for Andre and Melissa.
Flacks characters and events may be “fictitious and constructed for drama”, but she has so misrepresented hospital life that her play is unremountable. In spite of this fatal flaw, director Richard Greenblatt has drawn fine performances from the entire cast. Monteith finally gets the chance to play a disturbed but, for a change, not a neurotic character and conveys Chrissie’s fears and joys in complex detail. Pettle’s Jeremy is not as detailed but at least he plumbs an emotional depth he has heretofore kept hidden on stage. Spence is cast, yet again, as the tough, mouthy lady who is meant to lighten up a tense atmosphere. She is expert at this, but it would be a treat to see her cast as a different role type sometime.
Even if the doctors’ professional interrelationships are fantasy, Cohen gives a believable portrait of how a gung-ho surgeon would react to such a negative diagnosis and he subtly shows through pauses and word-loss how the disease is already progressing. Jenny Young does her best to make sense of the difficult and unrealistic position role Flacks has created for Melissa. Setshwaelo is welcome as an authority figure within the drama, even if there is no corresponding figure in real life.
Designer Kelly Wolf has linked the stage to the audience via a bridge that cuts through the first ranks of seats to join with the entrance to the auditorium. If this is meant to draw us into the drama, it does not since it separates the lower seats into two compartments. Besides this, Greenblatt only uses this bridge once for any significant action, making us wonder why this design feature is there at all.
Watching Waiting Room in increasing frustration, I wondered why no one told Flacks to write about what she knows (the suffering of parents) instead of what she doesn’t know (the skullduggery of doctors). If a playwright wants to write about what she doesn’t know, she either has to get it right, or write about something else. The play could simply have focussed on the anxieties of the inhabitants of a waiting room and compared and contrasted how people of different backgrounds and personalities cope while loved ones taken out of their hands struggle to survive. This would have made a very moving drama that would require a more innovative dramaturgy than Flacks employs. Waiting Room joins a number of other new plays at the Tarragon that should have undergone greater research, or at least inquiries into logic, before being green-lighted for production.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Jordan Pettle, Ari Cohen and Michelle Monteith; Ari Cohen and Jenny Young. ©2015 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit http://tarragontheatre.com.
2015-01-15
Waiting Room