Friday March 29, 2024
The God COmmittee
Review

The God COmmittee

July 29 2010

THE GOD COMMITTEE, Ensemble Theatre, July 23-August 29, 2010. Images by Steve Lunam

WHOSE LIFE is it anyway? is a question that was asked, effectively, by English playwright Brian Clark way back in 1972 with his play about a sculptor paralysed in an accident and wanting to be allowed to die. With the chief protagonist stuck in a hospital bed the debate and story raged around and within him with disturbing intensity: euthanasia, yes or no? It’s a debate that rages still and in different ways.

Same, same but different is the less visible and rarely discussed argument arising from the organ transplant business. It’s likely that you probably don’t give much thought to how the decision is made as to who gets a potentially life-saving and life-prolonging vital organ. It never occurred to me to think about it, that’s for sure. If I ever did I think I thought it sort of just happened. Mark St Germain’s neat 80 minute play illustrates what a dopey idea that was.

Set in the Manhattan boardroom of St Patrick’s Hospital (eeek Roman Catholic: don’t mention the euthanasia war), the play is in the tradition of the jury room wrangles of 12 Angry Men as well as bringing to mind David Williamson’s “Manning trilogy” of community conferencing plays. In these plays, a group of people – representing not only their professional status but also aspects of everyday human traits and personalities (archetypes, perhaps) are called upon to solve a legal, moral or ethical dilemma. In the course of the play, members of the audience find themselves being pulled from one opinion to another – for, against, unsure, changes of mind and so on. It’s a fascinating process of story telling.

The God Committee is the hospital’s group of medics whose responsibility it is to decide who will get a chance at life and the new heart being rushed through the Manhattan traffic (and of course it’s St Patrick’s Day too, so there’s the monster green parade to contend with). The unit has a list of possible recipients and it’s up to the group to make what is likely to be a death sentence decision for the unsuccessful and a new life for the winner.

The three top contenders on the whiteboard are a failed poet who’s HIV positive, a retired nurse who recently attempted suicide the previous year and the obnoxious, coke-snorting son of a billionaire-possible-philanthropist. How to decide? Is a person’s bad behaviour or foolishness to be taken into account? Personal feelings, religious prejudice and the dangling carrot of a multi-million dollar donation (bribe?) cannot be allowed to sway the decision; but in truth, how feasible and likely is that? Objectivity and subjectivity are in the eye of the beholder.

The God COmmittee

The group members are disparate but instantly recognisable: the feisty practice nurse (Pamela Jikiemi) is straight out of ER; the much-admired and kindly founding head of the unit (Robert Alexander is the team’s fatherly moral compass; the chief surgeon (Duncan Young) is as much of a bully and ego maniac as we‘ve come to expect of the top surgeon breed, while the young resident (Rachael Coopes), delegated to stand in for the senior team member who’s fetching the heart, is his fresh-faced and still idealistic opposite number. Rounding out the possibilities for arguments and viewpoints is a wheelchair-bound social worker (Peter Turnbull), a lawyer-turned Catholic priest (Noel Hodda) who’s a member of the hospital board – beware a priest bearing innocent questions – and finally, the unit’s psychiatrist (Deborah Galanos) who has her own personal traumas to deal with.

The interactions, squabbles, antipathies and friendships between the various members of the team flesh out the ethical and moral disputes and successfully drag the audience’s opinions back and forth. Don’t know what the figures are in Australia, but apparently there are 80,000 people in the USA at any one time waiting for a heart transplant; and in any given year no more than 10,000 organs become available. Imagine looking a patient in the eye as you tell them they will or won’t get the next one. And then how do you deal with issues such as the age of a patient (is it relevant if so why?), whether or not their is insurance and the patient can pay; and then, is the potential donation of multi-millions of dollars a good enough reason to choose a spoilt, coke-snorting brat if a heart for him could mean many more hearts and better research for others?

The members of the cast make the most of the text and get right into their characters. The format is relatively static – as befits a boardroom wrangle – but as the story-telling and the actors are as diverse and diverting as the group itself, it’s probably as well that the action stays focussed around the table and on the team in Andrew Doyle’s unfussy direction of the piece. However, he could usefully turn down Duncan Young’s volume a little: being a bellowing bully is all fine and dandy, but as he starts at 9 on the dial, there is nowhere else for him to go and it bleaches out the light and shade the character should have.

The God Committee is good entertainment and sharply done with some laughs along the way. My only question – and it’s one that comes up a lot in considering Australian theatre – is at the casting of Jikiemi (a black woman) as the nurse. In today’s USA it would be highly likely that the middle class psychiatrist could be a black woman and the mouthy nurse as likely to be a feisty white woman. It would make no difference to the outcome of the play but would make one hell of a difference to perceptions – audience and otherwise – and to actors, in a theatre industry that’s still very early 20th century when it comes to casting.

 

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