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:

The conventional, young, corporate executive, Ross Gardiner, is sentenced by a judge to pay weekly visits to the recently widowed and childless Mr. Green. Ross had knocked the elderly gentleman down when he stepped out into the road without looking. No real damage was done, but the judge decided that Ross had been driving too fast.

Neither man wants to be anywhere near the other. Mr Green sends Ross packing, and the younger man appeals to the judge for a different punishment, without success. He therefore returns bringing the peace offering of soup from a kosher deli that the passive-aggressive senior grudgingly devours. “Would I waste good food?” Their common Jewish identity makes everything better for Mr Green, although Ross does not care. For Mr Green the Jews are a people who suffered intolerance and murder and must stick together now. 

They begin to tell stories of their lives. Mr Green grievously misses his wife who did all the cooking and cleaning; “we never argued once in sixty years.”

Things slip back again when Mr Green learns that Ross is gay. Negotiating that shock is facilitated by the older man’s bafflement over how Ross’s father has abandoned and derided him; they slowly grow closer. Mr Green wants Ross to find a nice girl and be happy as he was. Ross patiently explains how that cannot work for him.

Then another crisis erupts when Ross learns that the Green’s had a daughter who married a Gentile for which crime she was shunned by her parents as if she had died.  It is compounded by the shocking discovery that Green’s wife had been writing to her daughter for thirty years without telling her husband. 

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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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Summary:

Centered on an 85 year-old widower named Mo, the play brings to life many of the issues around end-of-life choices. Mo talks with his late wife, Dolores, through her picture and lets her know of his plans to come back to her. but his plans are interrupted--first by a neighbor and later by his nephew. Each interaction illuminates some aspect of the issues facing Mo: risk factors (loss of his spouse, other friends, work); warning signs (insomnia, giving things away) and protective factors (strong relationship with his nephew). The play shines a light on these themes while always keeping the characters honest and real. Yet the play isn't morbid. The audience frequently shifts from tears to laughter as the play weaves in light moments. In one particularly funny scene, Mo's best friend appears handing out condoms and promoting "Safe Sex 'till Rigor Mortis."

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Summary:

In the well-written preface, Arthur Kopit describes how he came to write Wings, a play about stroke and language disorder. And he explains there how his fictional account of strokes and their aftermath, "is a work of speculation informed by fact." One fact important to Kopit was that his father suffered a major stroke seven months before Kopit was commissioned by National Public Radio to write an original radio play.

Wings, (which has been sucessfully staged as well) however, is not based on Kopit's father, but on the life of a character, Emily Stilson, who is an amalgam of people, both stroke victims and their stroke-recovered caregivers, from the rehab center caring for Kopit's father. The title of the play refers to an early career of Emily Stilson--she was an airplane wingwalker. Kopit deftly employs the sounds of an airplane in the scenes in which Emily is experiencing a stroke. In fact, the sounds and sights inside and outside of Emily as well as her private dialogue are combined masterfully by Kopit to bring about a high degree of verisimilitude to the chaos produced by stroke.

The play is divided into four sections: "Prelude," the moments before her first stroke; "Catastrophe," her trip to and stay in an institution; "Awakening," a longer section dealing primarily with her struggle to reorient and regain language skills; and "Explorations," where further therapy, including group therapy, and her eventual demise are portrayed.

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Summary:

Wit takes place in a University Hospital Comprehensive Cancer Center. The main character, Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., is a John Donne scholar who has stage IV ovarian cancer. Much of the action takes place in the last few days/hours of her life, although flashback scenes to weeks, months, even years before are interspersed effectively throughout the performance.

Bearing has lived an isolated life. Her love is her teaching and research. She is a stern taskmaster, perhaps "non-humanistic" in her approach. Similarly, she faces doctors and a medical system that emphasize technique over caring. She does find, in the end, compassion from a nurse who prevents the medical team from carrying out a CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) attempt that she did not want.

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Summary:

This play in eight scenes presents the fictionalized character of Alice James, sister of Henry and William James, who after a sickly childhood, succumbed at 19 to a variety of vague and recurrent illnesses that made her a lifetime invalid. She died at 43 of breast cancer.

In a series of encounters (with her nurse; her father; her brother, Henry; several Victorian female figures: Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson, and mythological figures from Victorian fantasy fiction and from Parsifal; and a burglar), as well as a long dramatic monologue, her various forms of internal conflict are hilariously and poignantly articulated. They converge on the implications of her recurrently deciding whether or not to get out of bed and do something, and her confusion, often discussed by biographers and critics, about her place in her brilliant family, her vocation as a woman, and her own desires.

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Summary:

Bessie, who has been caring for her invalid aunt and her father who is helpless after suffering a stroke, discovers she has leukemia. While this does not seem like a subject for comedy, this warm-hearted play really has some funny moments. Laughter is good medicine in this caregiving household. Bessie’s sister, Lee, who has been out-of-touch for years, arrives with her two sons in the hopes that one of them might be a bone-marrow match for Bessie. For Lee the idea of devoting her life to caring for helpless aging relatives would be wasting it.

One reason Lee doesn’t want to take over the caregiving for her father is that she has plenty of trouble trying to be a mother to her two sons, particularly Hank who has been committed to a mental hospital because he burned down the family home. She tells the hospital psychiatrist "Hank is something I cannot control, so what is the point of my visiting?" While Bessie will not find a cure for her leukemia, an important start on healing does occur in the play as Bessie helps both Hank and Lee to care for each other.

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