Beauty in The Waiting Room
The key messages of the play The Waiting Room, by Lisa Loomer, pertain to the pharmaceutical industry and cultural differences between people and their perception of beauty. Ken and Larry are the main two characters that the playwright uses to expose the problems with the modern day affiliation between the pharmaceutical companies and the government, and how the pharmaceutical companies have influence on the government. Larry is a prominent businessman of a pharmaceutical company, and Ken is a FDA officer. In the play, there is a promising new cancer drug being developed at a facility overseas in Jamaica. The drug overseas is already being tested and used at the facility, and is in the process of being established by the FDA as safe.Meanwhile, Larry’s company is in the process of developing a drug and, instead of urging Ken to speed up the process of admitting the Jamaican drug into the US to save lives, he is urging Ken to delay admittance of the drug into the U.S. The reason for this is because Larry holds stock in his company, and is delaying the admittance of the Jamaican drug into the country until he establishes his own drug and introduces it into the public in order to make money instead of saving lives. The playwright made Larry into a character that has can influence characters around him profoundly, and Larry has a very powerful influence on Ken. This is an insight into Lisa Loomer’s views on this modern-day issue. This aspect of the play’s main message is that even while new treatments are being developed overseas, the U.S. is falling behind in the area of health coverage because of greedy pharmaceutical companies. This is a very important point, and is illustrated well in the play.
The other, less serious message of the play is the cultural differences between people of different time periods and empires, and how their image of beauty is different. There are three main characters in the play: Forgiveness from Heaven, a Chinese woman whose feet are bound, Victoria, a proper lady from Victorian England, and Wanda, a woman from New Jersey who has breast cancer and implants. They all sit in the waiting room at the hospital and compare themselves and their cultures. Forgiveness from Heaven, while she loves her husband, is bound to him much like the bindings on her feet, and she is content with that. Her husband has five wives; she hates her bindings, but views them as a necessity to be beautiful. She even says in the play “Doctor tell me I have to wear flat shoes. I rather die than wear flat shoes.” She needs the bindings so much that she is willing to have gangrene instead of giving up the bindings. That image of beauty is so ingrained in her mind that she is very strongly unwilling to give it up.
Victoria has a very proper husband, who is a doctor. She, unlike forgiveness, is bound to him and has no freedom whatsoever, much like her corset. She is in the hospital for a hysterectomy. Like all women in Victorian England, she is not allowed to read or find out information on her condition, or anything for that matter. While in the hospital, she is constantly reading, specifically the works of Freud, among others. She is beginning to realize that she is in fact going crazy because she is so oppressed, not because there is actually anything physically wrong with her. When she realizes this, she begins fighting her husband about the procedure because it is not the solution to her problem. Her character is an analysis of the Women’s Rights Movement, and is an comparison to the struggle that took place when women first began to question their husband’s authority.
Wanda has no husband or boyfriend, and she is a product of the modern media’s image of beauty. She is confused about her perception of beauty. At first, she is the one that reads Cosmopolitan and Vogue and makes sure that her breasts are big enough and that she looks, as best she can, like the girls on the cover. When she discovers that she has breast cancer, though, her mind is changed about beauty. She forgets about the media’s interpretation and discovers her own vision of beauty when she says: “Yeah, dying would be a bitch. But isn’t it worse—not living when you’re alive?” She is essentially saying that she thinks that she would rather die than live a life where has a different interpretation of beauty—one that comes from an outside source.
Although these characters are different, they all have one thing in common: they all discover true beauty at the end of the play. For Forgiveness, it was when she took off her bindings and decided that it didn’t matter what her feet looked like, as long as she was comfortable with them. For Victoria, it was when she decided to not wear her corset and take all of her books with her home that she’d been reading at the hospital. For Wanda, it was when she decided to rid herself of her implants and try the new cancer drug at the hospital—the same one that Larry was developing. I think that the play ended well for all three of the women, but that Ken should have stood up against Larry and admitted the Jamaican drug into the U.S. On the other hand, in the play, the issue remained unsolved, and the problem persisted, as it does today. The last thing where the play left off short was Wanda and Douglas’s cancer cases. I would’ve liked to see what happened to them after they decided to go for the new drug. The Waiting Room was overall very well written, very humorous, and cunningly satirical. It also had two very important underlying messages, one about beauty, and one about the growing problem of the influence of powerful American pharmaceutical companies. It was overall a great piece of writing that had very well illustrated fundamental messages.
Labels: Beauty