Summary:

This short play has three characters: a woman, a man in camouflage, and a second man who turns out to be a doctor. The camouflage man talks on the phone with his unseen wife; he is angry and suspicious of what she has been doing during his absence. The doctor overhears – and thinks about confronting him, but lets it go. The woman is a victim of coercive sex in marriage. She has two places where she can take refuge, if only in her mind:  her garden and an imaginary elephant. The woman’s description of the elephant tells us that she is seeing the elephant as a reflection of herself, and it also reflects her traumatized awareness of the physical changes in her husband’s body as he helps himself to hers.

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Summary:

The play has two characters: Ruth and Friend (who is a male doctor).Ruth is an engaging, straight-talking quadriplegic who can zip and dance with her chin-operated wheelchair and takes delight in terrorizing medical staff both physically and verbally. She wants to write poetry and is waiting for a device to make it possible for her to use a computer. She keeps developing bedsores that threaten her life and require long admissions to the hospital before they will heal. She desperately wants to live no matter what happens, as she feels that having no mind would be worse than having no body.Friend is a male doctor with children who is ashamed of having examined her while she was unaware. Burdened with his guilt, he asks to be her “friend.” Ruth is skeptical and runs circles around him, but eventually comes to trust him and believe in his sincerity.She makes him a witness to her advance directive to instigate all heroic measures, as she is afraid of the kindly "ethical" and cost-effective arguments not to treat the disabled. But Ruth dies horribly from sepsis, and Friend is helpless to prevent it. She never obtains the device that would have allowed her to put her poems into printed words.

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Summary:

An artist, Ruth, lives with quadriplegia and manages to drive (and dance) with a special wheelchair that she controls with her chin. She also enjoys terrorizing doctors in the hospital corridors, where she is seen on a regular basis because of frequent bouts of infected bedsores. She has a new computer and is “patiently waiting for” a biomedical engineer to set it up to manage, like her chair, with her chin. She wants to write, to draw, to create. But the wait list is long, technicians scarce, and every candidate deserving.

On one of her admissions, Ruth meets the physician-narrator who is appalled by a medical resident’s lack of empathy in relating her case as if she were not present. Distressed by the encounter, the doctor is all the more disturbed when he notices that Ruth’s birth date is the same as his own.

He tries to make it up to her by withdrawing from her care in order to be her “friend,” one who tries to understand and will defend her strong desire to live despite her disability. Driven by curiosity about her past, her sharp wit, and how she faces each day, the doctor never quite achieves his goal and constantly feels guilty for letting her down as an advocate and a friend, and possibly also for being able-bodied himself.  He never visited her in her group home, and when she comes to hospital in florid sepsis, he is unable to prevent his colleagues from letting nature take its course. His own bout with severe illness, possibly MS—more likely a stroke--resonates with Ruth’s plight. Long after her death, he can imagine the acid remarks that she would make about his foibles.

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Summary:

In a dramatic monologue, Joanne traces the devastation of a familial proclivity to breast cancer through four generations of women: her grandmother Sarah; her mother; Joanne herself and her two daughters, one of whom is also Sarah.

Joanne’s mother and grandmother both died very young of breast cancer; however, many other family members vanished in the Holocaust and the number of familial cancer deaths is insufficient for her to qualify for genetic testing. Her friend Linda, also a mother of two daughters, learns too late that she carries the BRCA gene; she urges Joanne to be tested.

Tormented by not knowing and equally tormented by what should be done if the test is positive—both for herself and her daughters, she convinces a doctor to lie so that the test can be performed. It is positive; Joanne opts for bilateral preventative mastectomies. During a visit to the gravesite of her mother and grandmother, she begins to explain the genetic risk to her daughters. 

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Summary:

Twelve-year old Philip is admitted to the hospital for a month of nightly infusions of amphotericin, a drug used to treat severe fungal infections. Wise beyond his years, he’s been in the hospital before and is only too familiar with its routines: the "vampires" who take blood; the candy-stripers who volunteer cheerfulness.

Four nurses welcome Philip back, teasing him about his annoying but intelligent insights and promising excellent outcomes this time. The doctors are testing a wonderful new drug that should eliminate all the horrible side effects that he had experienced in the past. But the new drug does not work, and Philip passes a miserable night. 

He feels sorry for his parents who are eager for him to receive the best of care; he puts on a smile for them and notices them putting on smiles for him. He tries to be brave for the doctor too, but surprises himself by voicing his opinion, finally making his physician understand that the new anti-side-effect drug does not work.

In the midst of yet another difficult night, Philip decides that he will refuse all future infusions. And he begins to feel well. We do not know what will happen in the morning, but one has the hopeful impression that Phillip will have his own way.

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Summary:

A chorus of lab techs making symmetrical repetitive motions with microscopes, pipettes, and petri dishes opens the play. They persist in the background of the set, which is the waiting and consulting rooms of a clinic for reproductive technology.  The chief, Dr. Staiman, is not only an expert in this field of human biology — he also enjoys an international reputation (and many patents) for his genetic manipulation of orchids in a quest for perfect blooms.

Heather and Rose are both clients of the facility. Heather wants a baby and needs help to be able to conceive. Rose could actually conceive on her own; however, she is investing in expensive and painful genetic selection to avoid having a child with the same trait as her brother. His Tourette’s syndrome, she contends, ruined life for her parents and herself as well as for him.

It emerges that Heather too has Tourette’s syndrome, but she does not believe it ruined life for her family and is unafraid of having an affected child. The women must wrestle with the notion that Rose does not think someone like Heather should exist; and Heather wonders if she should be testing her own embryos.

The two clinic doctors, Blume and Staiman, offer similar services, but as an ethicist, Blume worries about the moral implications of the new technology. Heather challenges Staiman over his willingness to destroy an embryo that might become a person like herself. He seems baffled by her concern, claiming that science makes perfection possible and that the decision should belong to the parent.

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Summary:

Nurse Moira is caring for three different women in labour: two have female birth partners; one is alone. 

Teenage Stacey with her school friend Jeannine adopts a punk, devil-may-care attitude to the whole process, but shrieks in agony with her pains; she plans to keep the baby in defiance of all her family members and advisors. Unknown to Stacey, Jeannine once had a baby and gave it away for adoption; it is a secret that Jeannine wants to believe was for the best.

The solitary Jane had once adopted a baby like Jeannine’s only to lose it again within the requisite month-long waiting period. Heartbroken Jane and her husband paid for a woman to have IVF so that Jane could become pregnant. She is thrilled that she will finally become a mother, but her earlier experiences make her sympathize with mothers who cannot conceive or who have lost babies through adoption or death.

Eva an immigrant from Kosovo had been brought to Canada as a housekeeper by the driven businesswoman Carol, who is "coaching" her. Because Carol is no longer fertile, she deliberately goaded Eva into becoming a surrogate mother, inseminated artificially through her husband’s sperm. Should Eva refuse or break the contract, she will be returned to Kosovo. For fear of the slightest damage to the child that she intends to claim, Carol will not let Eva speak or have any analgesia. Eva is miserable; the audience hears her thoughts, but Carol and the nurse cannot.

Moira copes with the three radically different scenarios, succeeding in giving egalitarian care. Moira and Jane inform Eva of her rights, and she takes her baby and returns to Kosovo. 

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