I thoroughly enjoyed the play “The Waiting Room.” The way in which Lisa Loomer decided to relay the painful realities of how women beautify themselves, was appealing to all those who read it. The characters had very distinct personalities from different periods of time that helped spread the message of the play. It’s funny and romantic script lines brought a sense of comedy to this mostly serious play. Overall, I think “The Waiting Room” was very well done and opens your eyes to what women will go through to make themselves ‘more attractive.’
The play “The Waiting Room” has many interesting points that are directed towards the current perception of beauty. These points were fairly obvious to the reader, but there were deeper messages woven into the script. One of the messages that really struck me was how the three women had connections with each other based off of their views of what beauty really was. Throughout the play these ‘connections’ grew stronger as the women began to bond and understand one another. Even though these three ladies were from different time periods, they managed to get along and help one another out with their ‘beautifying’ problems. Their painful issues with beauty brought them together until each one of them was forever changed for the better.
Lisa Loomer does an interesting job describing how beauty plays a role in today’s society. By having the three women represent the vulnerability of how women worldwide and in different time eras are affected by beauty, brought an interesting view on the seriousness of this real historical issue. During the course of the play, the real purpose why this play was written is revealed. There are three main topics that are pin pointed and revealed in the play. These three topics are health, gender roles, and beauty.
By having the three women Victoria, Wanda, and Forgiveness From Heaven coming from different time periods, we get a sense of what they’re role as a women was in their era. Victoria is an English Victorian women from the 1700s with a husband named Oliver. Although Victoria is intelligent and can most certainly voice her opinions, she is unable to use these qualities as well as she might have liked because she is a woman. Victoria has been diagnosed with hysteria and has a tendency to panic and become confused in times of stress. Her ‘problem’ is caused by wearing an extremely tight corset that is forcing her uterus out of her body and causes hysteria which usually ends up in her biting someone and looking quite manic. Victoria’s husband Oliver however is not panicked at all and tries to ignore his wife’s problem and thinks that she is merely having problems with her ‘attitude’.
As the play progresses, Victoria changes her attitude when she meets two other women from a different era she is living in. As the play progresses Victoria begins to find that she is actually a semi-independent women with views to express without her husband’s permission. She begins to read novels of romance because I believe she was having very little faith in her relationship with her husband. But at the end of the play she seems to lose this ‘changed’ Victoria and goes back to her husband and her old ways of painfully beautifying herself.
One of the other women in the play is Forgiveness From Heaven. She is a wealthy Chinese woman from the eighteenth century who has her feet bound to please her husband. Forgiveness is waiting in the doctor’s office because one of the toes on her feet is coming off. This is the result of her binding her feet so tightly and her skin rubbing off. The reason she does this is for her husband, similar to Victoria. In ancient China, when girls were young their feet were bound so that later in life they would have tiny feet that would please their husbands. Throughout the play Forgiveness is a calm woman in her late forties who will do literally anything to make her feet seem beautiful, even if personal risk is necessary. Unfortunately, she is 1 of her husband’s five wives and when he finds out about her recent foot problem, he is horrified and gets a new wife.
When Blessing (Forgiveness’s husband) returns home with his new wife, Forgiveness at first seems saddened by the news. But she is able to hide this with curiosity about the new wife so as not to make her husband suspicious. This revealed to me that even though Forgiveness seems happy with her marriage, she is obviously troubled with having her husband be married to multiple wives. I believe that she wants a change that has new views on wether or not a man should have love for only one woman rather than many. At the end of the play though, releases her bindings from her foot and releases herself from dedication to her husband.
The last of the three women in “The Waiting Room” is Wanda who is in present time. Wanda is an opinionated forty year old from Jersey. Her whole goal in life is to perfect the way her body is and to do that she has gotten breast implants, tummy tucks, and multiple surgeries. Although she spends all this time making herself feel beautiful, Wanda is actually smarter than she looks. She may spend all of her time worrying about how the world sees her body, but she has ideas and speaks her mind when anybody crosses her.
At the beginning of the play when the audience/ reader starts to learn about Wanda, she is very focused on her outer image rather than on her inner beauty. She seems to think that the only thing in the world that matters is how you look on the outside. When Wanda is in the doctor’s office getting her breast implants looked at, a horrifying discovery is made by the doctor. It is found out that she has developed a tumor that leads to breast cancer. This completely changes Wanda as a person and gives her a new outlook on life. Although Wanda may not know it, she helps the other two women greatly with their beauty problems and helps them see what they’re really living for.
Although this play mainly focuses on the three women form different time eras, there are two males that play a major role in the flow of this play. Their names are Ken and Larry and they both deal with the pharmaceutical industry and the government's role in protecting American's health. Larry is one of the board members at a major cancer center and also the Vice president of one of the major drug companies. Ken is a scientist and an FDA official who is converses with Larry over pharmaceutical problems. One of the problems that the two of them discuss quite frequently is how drug companies take patients with cancer and test drugs on them as though they were guinea pigs. Larry believes that Ken has the power to control this, but Ken thinks otherwise and thinks that it is Larry’s responsibility as a drug producer to give out the right kinds of medication to patients that suit everyone’s needs.
The way that Lisa Loomer decided to conclude this play was in my opinion very artistic and left the reader/audience wondering, but at the same time content with the way in which it ended. Although, I would not have ended with Forgiveness as the ending character. I feel as if though she wasn’t as important as Wanda or Victoria. Another issue I think that was not resolved was the discussion between Larry and Ken that revolved around the responsibilities of the pharmaceutical industry. If Loomer had wrapped that off with a suitable solution it wouldn’t have felt as though the story was still hanging from a thread, but rather tied off with a good ending.
