Email
From bottom, Kate Costello, Kristín Hansen and Grace Lapsys play three women who suffer for beauty in “The Waiting Room.”
The Mother Road Theatre Company’s production of “The Waiting Room” looks at social and political forces behind the pursuit of beauty and health through the eyes of three women from different times and cultures.
“These are universal themes dealing with hard-hitting issues like cancer, the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry, yet (writer Lisa) Loomer is able to create humor. It’s dark, but it’s funny,” says director Becca Holmes. “Loomer holds a mirror or a weird prism to get a reflection of these women from different centuries all in the same waiting room.”
The play, first produced more than a dozen years ago, revolves around three women who have modified their bodies in a quest for beauty.
Forgiveness From Heaven, played by Grace Lapsys, is a Chinese woman from the 1700s whose bound feet are causing her toes to fall off.
Victoria, an English woman from the 1800s, played by Kate Costello, is diagnosed with hysteria and suffers from such a tightly strung corset that her internal organs protrude.
Wanda, a modern New Jersey woman played by Kristín Hansen, has breast implants that caused doctors to miss seeing breast cancer on a mammogram.
The women wait together in the 21st-century office of a doctor, played by Nicholas Ballas, who also has been diagnosed with cancer, but finds his alternative remedy options limited by government restrictions.
Despite the profit and political motives for the problems, Holmes says none of the characters is a villain.
“They are caught up in their own lives. They are all doing the best they can given the circumstances,” she says.
 |
||
|
If you go WHAT: “The Waiting Room” WHEN: 8 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 6 p.m. Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays, Nov. 2 through Nov. 25. No performance on Thanksgiving, Nov. 22 WHERE: The Filling Station, 1024 Fourth SW, corner of Fourth and Pacific HOW MUCH: $18 general admission, $12 students and seniors and $10 on Thursdays. For tickets call 243-0596, email reservations@motherroad.org or online at www.motherroad.org |
|
|
Ballas, a longtime actor, says he came to the play because he is a cancer survivor. He has been cancer-free for five years and says the play is cathartic.
“Douglas, my character, finds himself caught in a struggle between Western medicine and alternative cures,” Ballas says. “I had an emotional matrix to plug right into. I was caught in that same place.”
Hansen says she loves playing Wanda. “She has an immense lust for life. I love her journey.”
She says that the play doesn’t judge what the characters have done to bring themselves into their situations, but does look hard at the physical consequences of choices driven by artificial standards of beauty and greed.
“I think Wanda’s brought up in an environment where beauty is whatever is on the pages of Cosmo. She sees beauty as something outside and not within herself,” she says. “She pays a price for beauty. We all pay a price for beauty.”
Screening audiences at Mother Road Theatre Company chose “The Waiting Room” from three plays that the company presented during its annual preview performance, a “prebute,” says Hansen, who is a company member.
