200.
MERCY KILLERS
“Setting:
An interrogation room. The recent past.” This is how the program of Michael
Milligan’s solo play, MERCY KILLERS, in which he stars, describes the time and
place of its action. The key words here are “the recent past” because the play
is an excoriation of America’s health care crisis as seen through the personal
experience of two fictional characters, but not once in the entire 65-minute
performance are the words Affordable Care Act or Obamacare mentioned. Heartfelt
as the play is, and important as it might have been a year ago, we will have to
wait until the verdict on Obamacare is in before we can determine if the
problems depicted in the play will have been ameliorated by a system in which
every American has health insurance, regardless of preexisting conditions, and
that will cover catastrophic illnesses with no caps on the payments.
Mr. Milligan, a Juilliard-trained
actor, has been performing MERCY KILLERS around the country for a couple of
years, both in large and small conventional theatres and in union halls,
student unions, doctors’ residences, and even the House of Representatives
Hearing Room for members of the Minnesota legislature. The piece received a
2013 Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Festival, and has gotten a number of
warm critical responses outside New York. It’s currently at the Stella Adler
Studio of Acting in a black box setting using only a table and chair, and is
scheduled to move on to the United Federation of Teachers Bronx Borough Office
and the Local 3 IBEW and the Joint Industry Board Electrical Industry Center
Auditorium. It’s a good vehicle for instructional purposes but one wonders if
its time—at least that part of it related to pre-Obamacare health care issues—hasn’t
passed.
As anybody who hasn’t been living in
a gulag for the past few years is aware, America’s health care system can be
the nightmare on Elm Street for people who get sick and aren’t able to afford
the enormous costs that treatment can require. Michael Moore, of course, made a
major documentary, SICKO, that ferociously exposed the system; Mr. Milligan has
isolated a typical example of the kind of experience that average Americans
without sufficient coverage are (or should that be were?) likely to
encounter when they contract a major disease. He has created an everyman from
the Midwest named Joe, an inarticulate (except when he suddenly turns poetic), working-class
stiff who owns a car repair shop and reveres Rush Limbaugh (and his rants against
the “Nanny state”), although he eventually is forced to question Limbaugh’s
reactionary ideas. Surprisingly for someone with his profile, his beloved wife Jane holds liberal political attitudes that contrast vividly with Joe’s right-leaning
beliefs, just as her healthy lifestyle differs from his junk food-eating
habits. The deeply affectionate bond between Joe and Jane gives additional
emotional heft to the story, although it doesn’t really alter the trajectory of
the play’s main themes. People should be able to afford health care even if they
don’t have a spouse who loves them dearly.
As the flashing red lights that open
the play—following a few moments of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Our Land”—indicate,
Joe has been arrested and tossed into an interrogation room where, presumably,
he’s being questioned, although we neither see nor hear a police officer. Since this is a one-man show, there are no
questions, just Joe free associating and rambling on about his life,
with occasional comments to remind us that he’s speaking to a cop. His dialogue
aims verbal bullets at mortgage brokers, Wall Street, Bernie Madoff, the greedy
health care industry, pharmaceutical research studies, and so on, but, essentially,
Joe is delivering a confession regarding his response to a health crisis faced by his
wife.
We
learn from his monologue that Jane came down with breast cancer, requiring a
double mastectomy, and that the costs of her treatments mounted incredibly.
Then Joe and Jane’s insurance company cancelled their policy. Joe, a
libertarian believer in the American dream, found himself in dire
financial straits. He was cheated by a mortgage broker when he sold his house,
and his credit quickly dried up; with no way out, he was forced to defraud his
customers to earn more money and to divorce his wife so she could qualify for Medicaid.
While driving with Jane one day he hit a squirrel, stopped the car, picked up
the suffering animal, and put it out of its misery by snapping its neck. We’ve
already learned that, because of his judo training, Joe knows just how to do
this to kill or disable a person. Jane then asked Joe that, should she ever be
in similar physical distress, he do what he could to put her out of her misery.
The play climaxes when Joe reveals
that Jane, no longer able to bear her agony, tried to seek eternal rest by
taking every pill in the house. The effect, though, was anything but the
peaceful end she sought, especially because certain pills set off an allergic
reaction she hadn’t anticipated. Joe, seeing her horrific torment, was faced
with the dilemma of what to do, since they lived so far out in the sticks it needed
a half hour before the EMS could arrive. The scene, as Joe describes it, however, is
irrelevant to the play’s attack on the rapaciousness of the health care system
and the other ills in America’s greed-based society. Jane might have done what
she did even if she had the best health care in the world but lived too far
from medical technicians to get immediate assistance. It seems a mere
melodramatic contrivance, especially since the play never actually explores the
issue of euthanasia except in passing.
Mr. Milligan’s Joe is a shambling,
stammering, uneducated redneck in shabby clothes and a red baseball cap (the
only vivid color on the stage) with a passive-aggressive quality that makes him
move back and forth in frequently alternating fits of anger and restraint as he
blows off steam and then pulls back to blame himself for whatever he’s
chosen to criticize. Joe’s tics and mannerisms, designed to make him as
naturalistically authentic as possible, eventually grow wearisome, especially
since he’s in a perpetual state of anxiety and the role gives him little
opportunity to show a lighter, more humorous side. It’s a decent, well-crafted performance
but a limited one.
Still, there's plenty to appreciate
here and many will find it moving and true to their own experiences or
to those of people they know. Writing a one-man play that takes on health care as well as
many other social issues, and doing so within the context of a man’s tragic love
for a woman whose catastrophic illness causes her unbearable pain, is an
ambitious project; there are flaws here, but they are overshadowed by the
importance of the message. While nothing will cure mankind of greed, we can at least hope that the Affordable Care Act will
relieve some of the issues poignantly expressed in MERCY KILLERS.
