The Waiting Room by Lisa Loomer was a play about three women from three different time periods trying to achieve the image of beauty that was accepted in their time periods. The play starts out with all three women sitting in a waiting room of a doctor’s office. The three women names were Forgiveness from Heaven, Wanda, and Victoria. Victoria was a very polite tightly corseted English woman from the Nineteenth Century. She was at the doctor’s office to remove her ovaries because she was suffering from "hysteria". Wanda from New Jersey lived in present day and was visiting the doctor with problems with her silicone breast. Her implants had leaked causing breast cancer. Forgiveness from Heaven was an Eighteenth Century Chinese woman that was visiting the doctor because her toe had fallen off due to her bound feet. When reading this I thought that the lengths they went to, to achieve this idea was “beauty” was unnecessary.
I think the key messages that Lisa Loomer put in this play were the things we do for beauty. Forgiveness from Heaven bound her feet only to please her husband who had about four other wives. Victoria was only getting her ovaries removed because her husband, and only wore a corset because of her husband. And Wanda had gotten three breast implants and other cosmetic surgeries to be accepted.
Lisa Loomer focused a lot on how our modern society focuses so much on looks and the methods we take to achieve the beauty that our society strives for.. This play also shows that people are not considering their health when they do things to embellish themselves beauty wise. A good example is Forgiveness from Heaven, she had her feet bound which was very unhealthy for them because it causes lots of pain and her toes to fall off. Also the English woman, Victoria had a corset that was very tight. It caused her organs to move around having an end result of hysteria. This shows that people go to the extremes just to achieve the look appealing to the public eye. This play also showed us the roles men played back then. Victoria and Forgiveness from Heaven played the dominant role in the relationship. The men were in charge of the woman where today you see a woman playing the dominant role in the relationship. An example of men playing the dominant role in the play was Forgiveness from Heaven and Victoria. Victoria's husband, Oliver, made her get a surgery removing her ovaries because he didn't believe that her research about her disease was right.
I think each character grew throughout the play. The first one that comes to mind is Forgiveness from Heaven. At the end of the play she finally took off her bound feet and kind of just let loose and started to dance. At the end it is very unclear whether or not she dies or she falls asleep. Either way she definitely evolved in the play. Victoria was always gradually evolving. Victoria has been a subject to painful ways of becoming beautiful, a corset and 20-pound dress. She is stuck in her ways, because of her husband and the time period she lives in. She believes that it is okay hurt her stomach and live in an era where woman have no authority, because that is all she knows. She has to read in the secrecy of her room, and has strived for the research of scientific methods to cure her problems, by the end of the play she sees what she has been doing wrong and corrects it.. The author uses this as a window into the way of life in this time period. Victoria says: “I’m quite sure I can convince the doctor that my problems are in my mind!” despite what everyone is telling her she is still convinced that she can fix her own problems. Wanda started out reading Cosmo’s and Vogue but when she found out she had breast cancer she stopped thinking about the way she looked. Wanda taught the two other girls from the past a lesson, and being with them Wanda learned and realized how far she strived for beauty and how much time she has wasted throughout her life. “I’ve spent 6,750 hours of my life…on my hair”, Wanda states, “And yeah dying would be a bitch. But isn’t it worse- not living when you’re alive?” (pg.71).
Ken and Larry play a big role in this play, when reading I didn't think they were that important but they were. They're both people in the cancer treatment business. Larry has a method of treating cancer and he wants his method to be tried out. However there is another treatment that seemed more effective but he is being greedy. Ken works for the FDA. He is the person that decides whose treatments get tested and whose don't. I think that their role is portraying what really goes on in this business. It is trying to show that even though there are more effective treatments out there people are too greedy to let them be passed because they want their own to pass. It also gives us a glimpse in the pharmaceutical industry, and how greedy we have become or have always been.
This play ended with Wanda telling a story to Forgiveness from Heaven, I thought the story really showed how the characters all evolved, especially Wanda. At the very end of the play Forgiveness from Heaven un wraps her bound feet and starts to dance. I thought that she ended her play very well. The story kind of wrapped everything together, but I can't help but to wonder what happened to Ken and Larry and the other characters. I think she could've added a bit more to the play.