"The Waiting Room" by Lisa Loomer

"The Waiting Room" really opened my eyes to how beauty has made little progress in evolving throughout the ages. You can see perfect examples of this in the three main characters. Forgiveness From Heaven (time period: 18th century China) has had her feet tightly bound since she was a young girl, and puts up with the pain of loosing her toes (and her husband to other wives) just to make her husband happy. Victoria (time period: Victorian ages) is secured into her corset each day, and tolerates her organs being clamped together as well as letting everyone walk over her. Finally you have Wanda (time period: modern day) who is nearing forty years of age, and thinks the only way she'll be married within the next few months is to surgically enhance her body with breast implants, liposuction, and various other treatments. As you can see, all of these women are attempting to enhance their bodies to make themselves "beautiful"; and each one suffers the consequence. Forgiveness looses toes; Victoria is forced by her husband to get a hysterectomy because he believe her female organs are causing her hysteria; and Wanda goes through an ordeal with cancer because of her fake breasts.

On the surface, Lisa Loomer's play is a comedy, but when you get to dig deeper into the plot, you see how deep her words truly are. The part of the play I found the most moving was Wanda's monologue in the last scene. It summarized the play in a way that really made you think about our society's position on "beauty". She speaks about "three stupid sisters" (a.k.a. the three main characters) and how they went to a magician and asked him to make them beautiful, and when their beauty wore off he told them "I said I'd make you perfect. I didn’t say I'd make you perfect forever". She then goes on to talk about how the three sisters smashed all the mirrors in the kingdom and advised all the women about their beauty, always telling them that they looked fine. In a way, she describes a "perfect world" where everyone believes that they are beautiful for what's on the inside, not for what's on the surface.

This play is not only a play about what beauty has become, but also an insight on the government's role in health care. The two static characters that represent this are Ken and Larry; representatives from a major drug company as well as the FDA. They are constantly fighting over new cures on the market, several of which are yet to be proven. Their fights consist of two main sides; should we approve this treatment so we can potentially help more people, or should we not approve it in order to make more money?

In the end, our main characters are "freed" from their inability to see beauty past the surface. Victoria goes back to her strict society, but no longer takes orders from her husband, Oliver who wanted to stop her from reading. She remains in a corset, but does not abide by her time periods image of beauty being a quiet, obedient wife. Wanda finally realizes that she doesn't have to make herself aesthetically beautiful in order to fall in love. She finally accepts the fact that she has cancer, and realizes that you only get to live once, and wasting time on making yourself "beautiful" is wasting precious time you could be using for a new experience. I think that if the play were to continue, she would explore the world of cancer treatments, and allow herself to take her time and live each say as if it were her last. Forgiveness From Heaven is a difficult character to sum up because in the end you are unsure of weather or not she is dead, or just asleep. In my point of view, I believe her to be dead, and freed from worry about her mutated feet and unfaithful husband. I thought that leaving us to think about where the women would go from here was a very good ending to the play because you get to see each character's problem resolved (to a certain extent) and you know that what goes on from there doesn't matter. The three characters finally understand what they have been missing in life, and you know that none of the ladies are going to let anyone push them around or tell them how to be beautiful.