Waiting Room

By Diane Flacks

Chrissie and Jeremy have spent a great deal of time in shock, waiting—for news of their baby daughter’s post-operation recovery, for weekly scans to show that her tumour is gone, for robotic forty-five-second updates from Dr. Andre Malloy, their brilliant but arrogant neuro-oncologist. The hospital waiting room has become a second home where they struggle separately as parents and as a couple, where they laugh inappropriately, lose tempers, and find resilience as they confront a roller coaster of hope and despair and a crisis of decision-making. And just beyond the waiting room, Dr. Malloy faces his own dark and risky medical dilemma. With sharp insight, Waiting Room examines medical ethics, compassion, gallows humour, and humanity in life-threatening situations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781770915664

Diane Flacks

Diane Flacks is a writer/actor. Her plays include Bear With Me; Random Acts; Myth Me; Waiting Room; By a Thread; Gravity Calling; Luba, Simply, Luba and Theory of Relatives, as well as SIBS and Care with Richard Greenblatt. Diane also writes extensively for TV (among others, Working the Engels, Workin’ Moms, Baroness von Sketch Show, Qanurli and Kids in the Hall). She has been the national parenting columnist for CBC Radio, and a contributor to DNTO and Tapestry. She was a feature columnist for the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail. Diane has performed comedy everywhere from New York’s Town Hall to local bars to the Winnipeg Comedy Festival. Her four solo shows have toured nationally and internationally. She is currently developing a one-​person play called Guilt and a play with the Stratford Festival called Blessed. She has numerous acting credits over twenty-​five years in the business, and in 2019 she played Nathan in Nathan the Wise at Stratford.

Book preview

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For Heiko and Connor. This play is also dedicated to my family, Janis Purdy, and Eli and Jonny Purdy-Flacks.

Contents

Playwright’s Note

Production History

Characters

ACT 1

PROLOGUE

SCENE 1

SCENE 2

SCENE 3

SCENE 4

SCENE 5

SCENE 6

ACT 2

SCENE 1

SCENE 2

SCENE 3

SCENE 4

SCENE 5

SCENE 6

SCENE 7

SCENE 8

SCENE 9

SCENE 10

SCENE 11

SCENE 12

SCENE 13

SCENE 14

SCENE 15

EPILOGUE

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Playwright’s Note

Waiting Room began percolating as an idea in 2007 as I sat in a coccyx-crushing ikea rocking chair in the third-floor Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at SickKids Hospital with my baby son, Jonathan.

During our nine-month sojourn there, and in the frequent-flyer years to come, I could not have imagined the suffering I would witness or the deep humanity I’d encounter both from the medical staff and other parents. They became our world and our family. We also became unwitting roommates of the unexpected. Randomness ruled supreme. The way medical staff and patients interacted with each other in confronting the moment-by-moment medical instability of the babies: with grace, compassion, absurd humour, or with insensitivity fascinated, obsessed, and changed me.

One day, a friend from out of town visited us in hospital and said that when she walked the halls, she felt ghosts. That struck me. So many stories to tell. So many of us have or will confront the gut-churning whoosh of adrenalin, the roller coaster of hope and despair, the desperate moments of life and death decision-making that we sidled up next to during our time in hospital. And we were the lucky ones. We got out.

A few years later, I approached Richard Rose with the germ of an idea about medical compassion and risk. About a pediatric brain doctor who himself is diagnosed with a brain disease which forces him to push the boundaries of his skill, courage, brutality, and humanity. Richard commissioned a draft, and Tarragon has continued to faithfully support the development of this play. Richard Greenblatt came on board after I’d written the first draft, with dramaturgical deftness, and the baldly candid, loving encouragement that only a theatrical brother can provide.

We all collide with the medical system; we all yearn for both brilliance and humanity from medical staff—who have the most intimate job in the world—and this play asks, What should we expect from them?

Waiting Room is not my family’s story. Its characters and events are fictitious and constructed for drama. But it speaks to tricky, often insoluble questions that both patients and doctors confront when they find themselves on the precipice of life and death, when they contemplate whether they should risk, or refrain.

Production History

Waiting Room premiered at the Tarragon Theatre on January 6–­February 15, 2015, with the following cast and creative team:

Directed and dramaturged by Richard Greenblatt

Starring Ari Cohen as Andre, Michelle Monteith as Christie, Jordan Pettle as Jeremy, Jenny Young as Melissa, Jane Spidell as Brenda, and Warona Setshwaelo as Aayan

Stage manager: AJ Laflamme

Apprentice stage manager: Robin Munro

Lighting design: Bonnie Beecher

Set and costume design: Kelly Wolf

Sound design: Reza Jacobs

Projection design: Cameron Davis

Script coordination: Susan Bond

Characters

Andre: forty-five

Chrissie: late twenties

Jeremy: early thirties

Melissa: thirties

Brenda: late forties

Aayan: forties

ACT 1

PROLOGUE

We hear the sound of an MRI machine clanging, booming through the theatre. Sound of ambient hospital noises, monitors beeping, garbled announcements. On the rear wall, a series of projections of equipment in a children’s hospital appear.

SCENE 1

Parent waiting room.

A young couple sit beside each other facing the audience. The young dad,

jeremy

(early thirties), is jiggling his leg. The young mom,

chrissie

(a bit younger), touches his leg to try and calm him. He stops for a heartbeat and starts up again.

Beat of waiting.

He checks his iPhone for the time, sighs. Then

chrissie

checks hers and starts texting. He gets a buzz on his phone. The person she texted is him. He reads it and smiles.

They kiss.

They wait.

Enter Dr.

andre

Malloy, Pediatric Neuro-Oncologist (forty-five, handsome, a detached manner with an underlying charm, arrogant, brilliant).

andre:

Let’s go out into the hall.

The parents follow

andre

into a hallway as he walks and talks.

Dr. Arnaud is closing now. He believes he was able to resect the entire tumour. Jessie will be in the recovery room shortly and you can go see her about an hour after that. The volunteers will call you when she’s ready.

chrissie:

(stunned) So, this is—

andre:

—good news. (He starts to go.) I’ll check in tomorrow.

jeremy:

Wait, wait, um—

andre:

Yes?

jeremy:

Um—

chrissie:

Will she need more chemo?

andre:

It wasn’t effective, so—no.

andre

again starts to go.

chrissie:

What can we expect now?

andre:

Expectations have very little effect on outcome. I’ll check in later—

chrissie:

What should we expect to see, like, when we go in there?

andre:

Oh. Expect to see swelling around her cranium but also face and body, which will increase over the next few days. There may be discolouration and bruising around the surgical site. She’ll be