On the first Saturday of the play, I sat down in the Pico Playhouse, to see on its surface, the closed room dealings of renal dialysis candidate selection. However, what Christopher Meek’s play truly centers on is the core of who we are as persons when we get to choose someone else’s sentence of life or death when there is no crime to speak of. Who Lives? managed to mix humor with seriousness that director Joe Ochman ensured with a seemless flow of the story. One was always wondering when the protagonist tort lawyer Gabriel was going to quip something hilarious yet again. Or wonder if the good Dr. Shuster was ever going to get it, that it is the patient he is treating, not the disease. The play does a wonderful job of not only putting into the minds of the audience the current events of the time, but also to capture the social mores that were prevalent at the time: the white sporting goods store owner Lazlo’s nascent chauvinism towards women and racism towards the very gifted black concertist who remains wordless yet ever present in his melodies; the stereotype mother, Francine; the progressive Alice whose graduate school experience has led her to challenge the norm openly; the union leader, Baxter, who sees things from the common man’s view; the steadfast Father William, a priest who struggles with his own ethics as selection committee chairman; the ever-pleasing law clerk, Jenny, whose efforts are at times dismissed or praised depending on Gabriel’s mood; and the neglected trophy wife, Margaret, who gave up her career after obtaining her business degree to be mother and wife for her ever cynical attorney husband. In a lot of ways, Gabriel represents the stages that some of us go through from narrow to open-mindedness, from life to death, from in-human to human.
As someone whose significant other is still healing from a transplant in the last six months, I was curious as to the type of discussions that could possibly have taken place in the early stages of transplant medicine four decades ago. It was amazing to see that the focus was on where someone came from, what they did, what their race was, how many children they had, and what their perceived moral status was. Today, I know the criteria to be based on a host of factors based solely on the continued ability to thrive after the transplant is received with exclusion criteria based on the candidate’s health condition and scores such as the MELD (liver transplants). If the play has given insight for the initial groundwork for today’s standards in candidate selection, I can tell you first hand that when the call comes in the late evening for the transplant one has been waiting for, selection bias is at most, a minimum. Today, people can receive transplants whether they are illegal aliens, criminals, or combination thereof. That is to say, the standards are based solely on the health of the person and of the organ being transplanted. With this in mind, Who Lives? does a wonderful job of making one laugh, and yet hit home, for some, a little too close.
Medical Student
University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine
