The Waiting Room

by Lisa Loomer

Book Overview

THE STORY: A dark comedy about the timeless quest for beauty--and its cost. Three women from different centuries meet in a modern doctor's waiting room. Forgiveness From Heaven is an eighteenth-century Chinese woman whose bound feet are causing her

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822215942
• ISBN13: 9780822215943
• Release Date: October 1998
• Publisher: Dramatists Play Service
• Length: 79 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.3" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Great book

It's a great play where naturalist theatre disappears and three time periods all flow. Theatre of the Absurd.

The Waiting Room

Full of love, despair, and reality, The Waiting Room is a spectacular show that is sure to change anyone's life. We had recently performed this show at my high school, and of course, we were nervous at what type of reaction we might get from the audience. It is a very mature play filled with topics everyone in our current society is much too wary to talk about. For instance, sex, cancer, and medical politics. The Waiting Room begins upbeat, funny, and intriguing. There is so much laughter and so many catchy lines in the show it's sure to bring you to stitches with its absurdity. But, just performing this show brought the entire cast to tears. And when we finally presented it to our audience, they came out crying, bawling, incredibly moved. It is too sad, but too wonderful a play to pass up. Lisa Loomer did an amazing job writing a play about how women have suffered and how we should try to change it.

The Binding and Releasing of Women

I was emotionally exhausted after reading this play. This is not an easy play to read, or observe. This is edgy, hard, and Truth. How do our societies manage to destroy women, as they search for beauty? This is the finest play I have ever read on the oppression women face. Lisa Loomer places a 18th century Chinese woman, a 19th century British woman, and a 20th century American woman all in the same waiting room. The Chinese woman is there because her feet are rotting off because of binding. The British woman is there to have her ovaries removed because she suffers from hysteria, which is obvious because she wants to read and study Greek. Oh, and her corset is destroying her stomach, liver, and kidneys. The American woman is there because her silicon breast implants have leaked, causing breast cancer. All three of them think what they are doing is completely reasonable. All three think what the other two is doing is completely horrific. So we get the insider's and outsider's perspectives simultaneously within the same characters. The British woman and Chinese woman who have husbands who think their wives are very wonderful and beautiful and are completely in love with them. The American woman has no one- something telling about her culture. Underneath is a subplot of how the modern medical community searches for money, rather than cures- and the very nature of the system is designed to remove the most promising cures. The one detraction from the play is that the sexual scenes are quite graphic. I had wanted to perform this in my high-school drama class, but found I can't because of gratuitous sex. Frankly, artistically the play would have been better if it had discussed the sexuality and merely alluded to the sex, leaving it to the imagination rather than playing it out front. The play is full of humor, and provides great opportunities for actors. A number of parts are designed to be played by the same character, showing us how we are similar and dissimilar in different cultures in different eras. But everywhere, in every culture, we find a way to oppress women, and to encourage them to oppress themselves: to destroy their bodies, and to participate in that destruction, in order to maintain the male standard of beauty and the ideal feminine. There is plenty of humor in the play, both dark and light. You can not help but feel the disgust as you realize that, yes, in our culture too, we divide the woman into body and spirit, treat her as an object, change her into something she was not, destroy her body, cause in her sickness, disease, and death, so we can see the ideal of our minds expressed in front of us. For this reward, we lose the real woman that was present. It's the sin nature, going a long way back. And there are moments of hope and emancipation, which will bring you close to tears. Find a way to either watch, or read, this play.