The Waiting Room, Powerful Play

Waiting Room by Aowei Chenqi
We have just finished reading the Waiting Room by Lisa Loomer. It's a play about beauty, and three women in a waiting room. The first is a Chinese(Forgiveness) woman whose feet that are bound, her toe fell off, so she went to the doctor. The second is a Victorian (Victoria) woman with a corset that crushed her ribs. And last is a woman from New Jersey (Wanda) with breast implants (HUGE) and she went to check for cancer. They came from across time to modern day.The key messages from this play are that don't try to please other people so hard. The girls did everything they could to be beautiful to other people. The women all had a big problem of some sort and they still tried to look beautiful for no reason, which they found out.Lisa Loomer puts in her play how trying to look beautiful can lead to so many bad things. The Chinese woman had a toe that fell off. The Victorian woman had Hysteria from bad ovaries. And the final woman from New York had a tumor that was malignant. They lost the most precious things they had.Forgiveness had a husband that liked her feet. When her husband found out about the lost toe he was sad, Forgiveness could not make him happy. But Forgiveness was also sad because her husband had many wives and not just one "Oh Fine.(smiles) little problem with little toe. Fell off this morning."Victoria was a crazy woman. Whenever people said husband her arm would fling out with a tic. When people did something to her that she didn't like she would bite them. Her husband had a hard time controlling her "Sixteen. I got my first corset quite young."Wanda is not married, she lied about her age, and she has changed her breasts 3 times on each side. She is sad because she will have to lose her breasts to a tumor. She was also sad because she had not found someone that would love her. "Three sets. Six tits(laughs)"Ken and Larry were part of the pharmaceutical and scientific part of medicine. They talked about many cures for cancer in the play. Lisa Loomer clearly puts out how the government would only allow treatments that would be safe but also if it would earn good business.In the end Forgiveness wakes up from bed and comes out dancing an ancient Chinese dance. I don't know why Lisa Loomer did that exactly. Perhaps to leave it mysterious so that people could think of their own ending. Or because Chinese dancing would be a great way to represent beauty. If I could change the end of the play, I would want the part where forgiveness was dancing to be a dream. When she starts dancing, the 4 other wives come out and dance too. Than the wife that needs her feet to be bound would be sitting on a chair. Forgiveness would tell her today lucky day by the moon. She smiles and the play ends.