Play attacks ideals of beauty

BAILA LAZARUS EDITOR

Before I get into the nitpicking I seem to be doing of late, let me just say that I thoroughly enjoyed The Waiting Room. The cast is excellent and the writing is witty and clever. It reminded me of a really well-written sitcom, in the genre of Frasier. Unfortunately, like a sitcom, the play has two plot lines running through it that don't have much to do with one another. And we don't get to see the show, week after week, to see how those plotlines developed or how they will develop in a way that connects them.

The play opens with two women who come from the past, sitting in a doctor's waiting room – Victoria, a Victorian housewife who is suffering from hysteria, believed to be brought on by a suffocating corset that flattens her ovaries and displaces her kidneys; and Forgiveness from Heaven (hilariously referred to throughout the play as "Mrs. From Heaven"), a Chinese wife whose footbinding has caused her to lose her little toe. Soon we are introduced to Wanda, a woman who has had three breast-enlargement surgeries and who is threatened with cancer.

The comments on what lengths women have gone to in order to conform to a contrived idea of beauty is obvious. But it's inconsistent. The Chinese lady is princess-like. Her painful suffering was a result of her own parents' decision to have her feet bound to conform with the period's expression of beauty. Victoria's corset, while ridiculous to us in the 21st century, would have been seen as a normal fashion trend that highlighted the curves of a woman's figure, and the richness of the fashion that her corset allowed her to wear would have been envied. Wanda, on the other hand is a loud-mouthed caricature of herself – crude, blond, high heels, butt jutting out, boobs a ridiculous size triple D. She doesn't fit in with the other characters – respectable women who would have been envied in their day.

But even putting aside that discrepancy, I wondered where the play was going when we were introduced to the three main male characters – the caring doctor who is constantly frustrated at not being able to fully help his patients; a selfish, mercenary vice-president of a pharmaceutical business whose company is working on questionable cancer treatments and who sits on the board of the doctor's hospital; and a Food and Drug Administration employee who doesn't mind scratching a few people's backs as long as his gets rubbed, as well.

What these two groups of characters have to do with one another is beyond me. The connection, as written in the play, comes through the fact that Wanda may not get a potentially life-saving serum because the pharmaceutical VP is preventing it from coming into the country. (He doesn't want it competing with his own company's drug.) But aside from that, there is no thematic connection. One group represents the detestable physical deformities suffered in the name of beauty; the other represents selfishness in business to improve profits.
As well, the three illnesses that the women suffer from cannot be compared to one another and therefore, also, do not fit into the same theme. Unlike deformities from footbinding and corsets, cancer is not the result of a fashion trend. It has existed for millennia and will continue to exist. It occurs in people who have never had implants, who have never smoked and who have led exemplary and healthy lifestyles. While it might have developed or been exacerbated through use of pesticides or second-hand smoke or genetically modified organisms, it's not solely the result of a beauty trend. In fact, even the doctor admits he doesn't know where the cancer would have come from and it might have been caused by conditions at an earlier job at which Wanda worked.

One line is especially disturbing – both for the content and its implication. "Forty-six thousand women died [from breast cancer] and we don't even put their name on a quilt," says the doctor's assistant, who is pushing for the use of alternative cures for cancer. What is the writer saying? That all 46,000 died due to a search for beauty? That's ridiculous. It's a discussion that belongs in another play.

Ultimately, the play is supposed to ask, "At what cost beauty?" For that, you can have a Chinese lady with bound feet hobble across the stage – the message is disturbingly clear. But what else do you need? If you're going to bring cancer into it, "At what price beauty?" is inappropriate.

Despite this questionable connection, the play is definitely entertaining from beginning to end. The acting is first rate and there is a brilliant use of curtains to divide the stage and to act as screens on which a film is projected in order to create a backdrop for a scene or in order to show the effects of footbinding or corset wearing.

The Waiting Room was written by Lisa Loomer. Lighting design is by Itai Erdal. It plays at Studio 58, Langara College, until April 3. The show runs Tuesday to Saturday, 8 p.m., with Saturday and Sunday matinées. Tickets are $20/18; matinées are $9. For tickets, call 604-257-0366.

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