|
|
By Elaine Schattner, MD, on June 24th, 2011
 A few weeks ago I saw The Normal Heart, a play about the early, unfolding AIDS epidemic in NYC and founding of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. The semi-autobiographical and now essentially historical work by Larry Kramer first opened at the Public Theater in 1985.
Cover of the paperback, published by “Plume,” from Wikipedia
The story takes on the perspective of a young man who’s seeing the death of too many of his friends and neighbors from a strange and previously-unknown disease. As much as the situation is disturbing, and frightening, and shattering of the gay men’s barely decade-old freedom to behave as they choose, most of the protagonist’s associates just can’t deal with it. Nor can other, potentially sympathetic officials like Mayor Koch, health officials at the CDC and NIH.
Among the men who form GMHC, in this drama, there’s a mixed crew. Some say they’re embarrassed by the attention the illness drew to
See more Looking Back on ‘The Normal Heart,’ and Patients’ Activisim
By Elaine Schattner, MD, on May 26th, 2011
 A short note on Good People, the title of a new play at the Manhattan Theatre Club starring Frances McDormand –
It’s a simple story, at some level, about a middle-aged woman from south Boston who loses her job. She has a disabled, adult daughter who needs caregiving, and she needs money. She contacts some old friends, and scours the neighborhood for a job. She encounters a once-boyfriend, just for a summer at the end of her childhood, who’s become a doctor with a fancy office and a fancy house and a beautiful wife.
Frances McDorman, in a photo for the MTC
And she’s angry, angry because she’s never been able to leave her community despite, as she puts it, “being nice.” She put her daughter’s needs first and helped others when she could – or so she says, but she was too often late for work at one job and the next, because she was waiting for the daughter’s sitter, or
See more Good People, a New Play About Chance, Decisions and Fate
By Elaine Schattner, MD, on March 4th, 2011
 Last weekend I went to see a strange, slightly unnerving play, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore by Tennessee Williams. It’s a sad take on the end of life, and desperation in some lonely characters.
Olympia Dukakis plays an aging, vain, older woman who’s dying of an unnamed condition. She takes morphine injections help her “neuralgia,” and uses liquor to entertain guests and, without success, to blunt her emotional pain. A handsome young man, presenting himself as a poet and sculptor of mobiles, climbs up the hill on which rests her Italian villa.
She’s no fool and quickly learns of his moniker, “the angel of death.” It’s said he has a particular fondness for terminal, moneyed women. Still he is impoverished; he shows up essentially starving and with nearly nothing in his sack; he has not exactly benefited from his exploits.
Darren Pettie and Olympia Dukakis
Dying alone is scary, unbearable. So she
See more Portrait of a Peculiar Relationship at the End of Life
By Elaine Schattner, MD, on November 11th, 2010
 Franklin’s story starts like this: She was born in 1920 to a Jewish family in London. She excelled in math and science. She studied physical chemistry at Cambridge, where she received her undergraduate degree in 1941. After performing research in photochemistry in the following year on scholarship, she joined the British Coal Utilisation Research Association (BCURA) and carried out basic investigations on the micro-structure of coal and carbon compounds, and so earned a Ph.D. from Cambridge University. She was a polyglot, and next found herself in Paris at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimique de l’Etat, where she picked up some fine skills in x-ray crystallography.
You get the picture: she was smart, well-educated and totally immersed in physical chemistry before, during and after WWII. Single-minded and focused, you might say –
See more A Play About the Life and Work of Dr. Rosalind Franklin
By Elaine Schattner, MD, on November 1st, 2010
 “If it’s chafed, put some lotion on it.” — some practical advice, offered by the character portraying Andrew Jackson, speaking toward the audience in the last scene of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, a play written and directed by Alex Timbers
See more No Quick Fix
|
|
