The Waiting Room

This comedy/satire that we just recently completed, titled The Waiting Room was a story about three women that lived in completely different time periods. This whole story revolves around Wanda, Victoria, and Forgiveness From Heaven. Wanda is a modern girl from “jersey” who is flirtatious, ballsy, and has had six breast implants. Victoria is an English Victorian woman that wears many layers. She is very witty, proper, and is diagnosed with hysteria. She is tightly corseted and is stripped of most of her rights, by her loving husband. Forgiveness From Heaven is a wealthy Chinese woman, who can be portrayed as “ditsy.” She is always happy and has an “enduring smile.” She binds her feet in order to please her husband.

The ironic part of this play is that these three different women all do something to their bodies to make them more “beautiful,” but in the end they all realize that they don’t need to enhance their appearance to please others. This is just one of the key messages of this play, but the most important. Another important message that I got out of this is that you need to rely on other people to help you through rough times.

The point that Lisa Loomer (the author) is trying to get across to the public is that there are many people that do so many things to their bodies to make themselves look more “beautiful” but all their really doing is harming their well-being. This also goes to show that even back then, women were changing things about them, regardless its bad for their health

These three characters have evolved greatly from the beginning. When we first started this play, all these women met while waiting for the doctor to fix their numerous problems. Wanda has a tumor in her breast because one of her implants has leaked. Victoria is convinced that her ovaries were going to come out of her, due to the corsets and many layers of clothes that she wore daily. Forgiveness’s toe fell off because she would continuously bind her feet. While she was doing so her pinky toe accidentally fell off and she treats it like that happens all the time. The ironic part is that in the end, they all give up trying to impress others and in return gaining more freedom.

This play also shows how the government plays a role in the peoples health. Ken and Larry are two other important characters in this play, and represent the government. Ken is a FDA agent, and Larry is the vice president of a major drug company. Throughout this whole play, these two men are discussing new cures of cancer. The only thing is that greed and money plays a huge part in their conversations. During all their conversations, it seemed like they were just gambling with the patient’s lives. This says a lot about how Lisa Loomer thought about how the government plays a role in the American health. I also notices that all their conversations were about business and trying to persuade the other person into using/or not using a new drug. I personally don’t think they play that big of a role in the overall message. I think that the outcome of this play would have been the same even without these characters.

Well I thought that the ending of this play seemed kind of weird. This play ended with Forgiveness dancing and just letting everything go, and not caring about all the problems she is still faced with. It most seemed like the author was meaning to write an ending, but forgot. If I could re-write this section I probably would have talked about their life after meeting each other. Although in some ways I do like how the ending was written. It is very open-ended, and allows for many conversations. On the flip side it might be a little too open-ended and doesn’t address the issues that the characters still have to go through.

In conclusion, I thought this was a very well written play, and made you think, and allowed for multiple discussions.