Rehearsal: Dr. Klee (Paul Eikelboom) and Dr. Gorman (Alissa Coutts) in a tense exchange
With three patients waiting for a heart transplant, two hours to decide who gets one, and only one heart available, how do we decide who gets it and who doesn’t? Providence College’s 2009 theatre production of The God Committee will have you holding your breath from the opening curtain to the final scene. After successfully staging classics such as the Helen Keller story, and last year’s To Kill a Mockingbird, this year’s production is a bright new contemporary piece that has been staged off-Broadway in New York over the past two years to considerable success.
The taut script traces the rising tensions between members of a heart transplant selection committee in a modern-day hospital boardroom. With a newly harvested heart en route to the hospital, and a race against time to decide who gets it, complications abound. Skewed drug tests, compromised motives, personality clashes, and a questionable monetary donation by the father of one of the transplant candidates all strain the decision-making process, and expose the decision-makers. The result is a collision of medicine, money, morality, and mortality, as we struggle to understand how decisions should be made about who lives and who dies, and who actually makes those decisions.
Though the committee is supposed to make their decision based on statistical and medical criteria, we see their prejudices – both noble and ignoble – at work. There is the noble senior surgeon now suffering from cancer; the ambitious, hard-headed yet vulnerable superstar cardiologist; the grief-stricken psychiatrist still mourning her daughter’s death; the wise-cracking, well-meaning, wheelchair-bound social worker; the lawyer-turned Catholic priest sent by the hospital board; the youthful, innocent proxy learning to vote her own conscience; and the down-to-earth, loyal-to-a-fault nurse who runs the proceedings. Inevitably, their agendas clash and the debate gets personal when sensitive nerves are exposed. Together they may be The God Committee, but they all have feet of clay.
Thematically, the play exposes and explores the personal subjectivities that complicate the supposedly objective world of medicine, all while lives hang in the balance. Medical technology, along with other forms of advanced technology in our post-modern world, is racing ahead of our ability to know what to do with it ethically. The result is that humans are forced to make choices they are ill-equipped to make. “We are forced to play God” says Val Hiebert, Coordinator of the Providence Theatre Program, and producer/director of the play. “Because our technology makes something possible, we feel compelled to do it, even if we often aren’t certain what the best choice is – we are confronted with the tyranny of the possible”.
An unusual aspect of the play is that it takes place in real space and time. The single set is a hospital boardroom, and the play runs the actual 90 minutes it takes for the committee to make its decision, without a single physical scene change, or even an intermission. The relentless pace of the verbal sparring about everything from public ethics to personal choices requires the audience to think hard and fast about complex issues, as they try to get inside the heads of the fascinating characters created by the playwright, Mark St. Germain. In the process, the cast and crew hope that those who see The God Committee will be sensitized to the fragile, fascinating, and life-saving work of organ transplant programs. Masterfully mixed with riveting twists, and both light and dark humour, the audience is rewarded with a gripping theatre experience.
There will again be a matinee reserved for high school students, as there was last year. Public performances are Thursday, February 19th through Saturday, February 21st, 7:30, in the Providence College Chapel in Otterburne. Reserve tickets are available for $8.50 by calling 1-800-668-7768. Tickets will also be available at the door for $10.00. Students tickets are $5.50 (reserve or at the door).
