Loomer play spotlights three ladies in 'Waiting'

Have you ever thought that the person sitting next to you in the doctor's office was from another era? Lisa Loomer's play "The Waiting Room," proves that you were right, and then some.

REVIEW
	The Waiting Room Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 and 7 p.m. Performance Network, $12 for students

The comedy opens with three women sitting in the waiting room of a doctor's office: Victoria, a tightly corseted, hysterical Victorian woman, waiting to have her ovaries removed in hopes of curing her hysteria; Forgiveness, a wealthy 18th century Chinese woman with bound feet, hoping to have her toe re-implanted; and Wanda, a contemporary New Jersey bachelorette, having problems with the latest of her breast augmentations.

As they make small talk while waiting to see the doctor, light waiting room conversation turns into a deeper examination of, as Loomer says, "who is in control of what happens to whose bodies?" The humorous path their discussion follows soon becomes serious as they challenge each other to answer this question.

Victoria is told by her domineering husband that her ovaries are the problem behind the psychological breakdowns she experiences, although her research on Freudian theories has forced her to differ in opinion.

Forgiveness had her feet bound from the time she was a young girl because in her culture it is considered a symbol of beauty. For the benefit of her husband's pleasure, she wants to have her toe replaced and endure the pain that binding brings just to make him happy at the expense of her misery.

Christine Huddle stars in "Waiting."

Wanda, a single woman, is continuously improving her looks in hopes of finding that someone special. What she finds instead is breast cancer that has spread wildly enough to require the ultimate threat: a mastectomy.

The contrasting consequences that have brought these women to the doctor present a search for more answers about the balance of power between men and women, between Eastern and Western cultures, and between orthodox and unorthodox medicine.

The director Susan Regan asked, "what is beauty and who has defined it?" While corsets nearly killed women in earlier times, today we have breast implants that offer just as much risk. And all for the price of looking terrific in the eyes of whom?

Lisa Loomer's play offers one further issue that lurks beyond that of self-mutilation in the pursuit of beauty, and that is the medical business in and of itself. The doctor himself begins to wonder the value of his craft; he wonders if it is a healing art, a moneymaking business, or manipulation of one person's body to satisfy the desires of another.

The play, which won the 1994 Jane Chambers Playwriting Award, has a lesson for all of us. As the Jamaican nurse who attends to the doctor best puts it: "Mother nature has a cure for everything except human nature." It becomes clear that it is a treatment only we as individuals can discover.

The next time you're in the doctor's waiting room, listening for your name to be called, pay a little more attention to that stranger sitting next to you.

The play will feature an American Sign Language interpreter at the matinee performances on Sunday, Nov. 30.

11-19-97