The Waiting Room, by Lisa Loomer, disappoints

The Waiting Room, written by Lisa Loomer, directed by Janet Morrison
Brandeis Theater Company, Spingold Theater Center, Waltham, MA
October 12-22, 2006

‘The Waiting Room,’ written by Lisa Loomer, had potential. The themes - how standards of beauty dig into women’s psyches, how a largely male medical field lacks sensitivity toward women in crisis, and how profit and politics corrupt big time research hospitals - are a worthy trio of subjects that could be shaken into a powerful cocktail. Alas, what we’re served here is a cherry coke, a flat one at that.

Loomer’s attempt to cobble the themes together just doesn’t work. The play feels more like several sketches lifted from a playwright’s workshop. The setting, described in the playbill as “the past, the present, and often both at once” is awkward and often confusing. The three main characters meet in the waiting room of a hospital. Each woman appears to be from a different country - America (Wanda), China (Forgiveveness from Heaven), and England (Victoria) - and from different centuries.

What they have in common is medical men and husbands who don’t understand them or their medical plights. The subjects of breast cancer (Wanda), foot binding (Forgiveveness from Heaven), and hysterectomies caused by vise-like corsets (Victoria) are easy targets and have been mined thoroughly by other writers. ‘The Waiting Room’ doesn’t add any new insights to the subjects.

This production, recently mounted by the Brandeis Theater Company at the Spingold Theater in Waltham, MA, had a serious identity crisis. Its use of farce just didn’t gel with the play’s more dramatic aspirations. Dramatic impact was frequently diluted, if not entirely dissipated, by the attempt to inject sight gags into emotionally charged scenes. The second act, a shot at how "the bottom line" puts profits before patients in some research hospitals, seemed to be lifted from another play altogether.

Photo of the Waltham production
To add to the woes, the characters, with one or two exceptions, just didn’t have the acting chops to carry off either the dramatic or the farcical demands of the play. The four male actors lacked any sort of nuance; even comic sketches seemed out of their reach.

One thankful exception to the overall tepid acting was from Sara Oliva, as the American woman whose breast implants, all three sets of them, have probably brought about her breast cancer. When she swaggers in to the waiting room’, her “new tits” plowing ahead of her like the bow wake of a luxury liner, the play takes on life. The play sags every time it focuses on other actors.

Oliva’s characterization of Wanda, a working class Jersey girl, masks a life of ugly-duckling hurt behind outrageously vulgar humor. The pathos she invokes as she loses her breasts to cancer as the play grinds on through nearly two hours is a convincing tour de force of acting. Even her bravura performance doesn’t make the play worth the two hours spent witnessing ‘The Waiting Room’.

Comments

[Joan Beaubian]

I attended this performance and thoroughly enjoyed it.

[Kal]

I feel your lack of understanding the relevence of the story and the predicament, not only of these women, but all women may have hindered your enjoyment of the production. From the sound of your review, you attempted to take this play too literally, too linearly, and that is not how Lisa Loomer writes. Broaden your horizons. Women write plays in a very different voice than men do.