Customer Reviews

The Waiting Room

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4 star:		(1)
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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.

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.

I saw this play 15 years ago with three diverse friends. We each were amazed by it from our own points of view. I have searched for another production that would be in my area of DC/Baltimore - I want to share it again and again. I'll buy the paperback and hope I can interest my friends in reading aloud. Should be interesting.

This movie centers on three women from different periods of time who have been subject to various body modifications for the sake of beauty (male-defined beauty, that is)

You have a woman from the current era that is sick from her breast augmentation (I'm sure we've all heard of silicone bags leaking) a woman from the Victorian era who has been bound in a corset for much of her life, and a Chinese woman with bound feet. All of them end up in the Waiting Room because of men - the Chinese woman's toes are falling off and her feet are deteriorating/rotting due to her bindings. (yes, footbinding could be deadly at times!) I found the Chinese woman's name somewhat ironic - Forgiveness from Heaven (though I do think it is a beautiful name)

The Victorian woman's husband wants her to get her ovaries because back then this was believed to solve 'women's hysteria' (and all she wanted to do was get an education! It's ridiculous that at a time, men actually considered this crazy for women) Her corset is also doing damage to her stomach and kidneys, a sad risk of corsets back then especially for women who wore them all the time to achieve the wasp waist.

The third woman is not married, she's actually single despite her breast implants, and the fact that they're slowly killing her isn't helping her either.

The irony is that the men see the body modifications from the other eras to be barbaric - the Chinese husband thinks the corset is awful, and vice versa. Also, the husbands of the Chinese and British women love them and think they're beautiful - so they say (so why wouldn't the British husband want his wife to be happy by letting her have her education?) It shows that men often act misguided when they think they're doing something out of love.

I shall not give away the ending, but it was bittersweet and felt somehow appropriate - a different ending might have lessened the impact of the play. This play gives a lot to think about, and it would be awesome to see it turned into a real movie so it could reach a wider audience.

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