This play, “The Moment of Death,” exists because one night in December 1987, halfway through my last year of medical school, I went to see a play, a comedy. Suddenly I saw my last four years, not as professors, classes, and classmates, but as scenes, and characters.
For the rest of the winter, I regularly woke up at 3 a.m. with a new scene from medical school running in my head. I couldn’t sleep until I got up and wrote it down. It was like being pregnant with an alien.
The University of Washington, where I went to medical school, also had a great drama school. So, in the last months of my medical education, I took Theater 101 classes. After I finished my Family Medicine residency in Portland, I got a small grant to develop the play with actors and a director, and produced a staged reading.
I arranged this excerpt for the Restoration Row podcast’s end-of-first-season wrap party in SoHo, NYC. I Skyped in to read the part of NINA. The other readers are Sheree Wichard playing MAMA and NELLIE MCKEAN, Ashley Turner playing DR. CARISON, and Ingeborg Riedmaier on Stage Directions. Uzochukwu Chima is the Host and Executive Producer of the Restoration Row podcast.
For the rest of the winter, I regularly woke up at 3 a.m. with a new scene from medical school running in my head. I couldn’t sleep until I got up and wrote it down. It was like being pregnant with an alien.
The University of Washington, where I went to medical school, also had a great drama school. So, in the last months of my medical education, I took Theater 101 classes. After I finished my Family Medicine residency in Portland, I got a small grant to develop the play with actors and a director, and produced a staged reading.
I arranged this excerpt for the Restoration Row podcast’s end-of-first-season wrap party in SoHo, NYC. I Skyped in to read the part of NINA. The other readers are Sheree Wichard playing MAMA and NELLIE MCKEAN, Ashley Turner playing DR. CARISON, and Ingeborg Riedmaier on Stage Directions. Uzochukwu Chima is the Host and Executive Producer of the Restoration Row podcast.
A short play. The championship fight between Dr. William Osler and Dr. Buckaroo Banzai.
Performed as a staged reading at “Bioethics Across Borders,” annual meeting of ASBH,
American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. Montreal, 2003.
A short play. When I read a magazine’s summary of this very interesting study–probably while standing in a grocery store checkout line–I realized that the research procedure must have been hilarious.
The study: “MHC-dependent mate preferences in humans,” by Claus Wedekind. Proceedings of the Royal Society, 1995:260(1359):245-249.
This play was workshopped by the Northwest Playwrights Guild, under the direction of Diane Englert. Rebecca Becker originated the Professor, and Acasia Wilson created Terri.
It was produced in New York by the Love Creek Festival, directed by Kathy Monahan, with Jennifer Drake and Riley Jones-Cohen;
and in Los Angeles at City College, directed by Louie Piday, with Melissa Courter and Nicole Mansour.
First published in The Journal of Irreproducible Results, www.JIR.com