Reggie (Alicia Pilgrim, center) is asked to sign a medical consent form by Jonathan (Bartley Booz, right), while her skeptical sister Anna (Gabby Beans) looks on, in Gracie Gardner’s I’m Revolting.
Hospital waiting rooms are queasy yet strangely intimate spaces that have a way of whittling away pretense and revealing a person’s true self. Relationships with strangers can feel significant. Sensitive information about bodies is routinely, almost blithely, discussed. Gracie Gardner makes use of this fraught setting in I’m Revolting, which takes place in the waiting area of a skin-cancer clinic in New York City in 2019. Under Knud Adams’s direction, the play has flashes of excellence but never fully coheres or figures out what story, exactly, it is telling.
Unhappily married Jordan (Glenn Fitzgerald, left) and Liane (Emily Cass McDonnell) await Liane’s turn in the operating room.
The set, designed by Marsha Ginsberg, consists of six chairs facing the audience, a cardboard cutout of a white male doctor advertising a cancer drug, a vending machine, a water dispenser, and some fake plants. And of course there is the institutional fluorescent lighting, perfectly captured by Kate McGee’s lighting design. Mirrors at the back of the set reflect the audience, an unpleasant reminder, perhaps, that our turn in a waiting room will arrive soon enough.
The attending doctor, Denise (Patrice Johnson Chevannes), and her young resident, Jonathan (Bartley Booz), begin the day by running through the list of incoming patients, a preview of the other characters. They are overworked and understaffed, though Denise would never allow that to excuse any sloppiness. Interactions between Denise and Jonathan begin and end the play, but Denise’s character, in particular, stubbornly remains a cipher. Perhaps she’s meant to represent “Doctors” writ large, with her calm and capable demeanor, but her individuality doesn’t shine through.
The first patient of the day is Reggie (Alicia Pilgrim), who is 19 and requires nose surgery; she is freaked out not just by her cancer but by potential disfigurement. Reggie’s sister, Anna (Gabby Beans), isn’t much help in the brief time she’s there: she’s an overworked and self-involved market analyst. The humorous patter with Anna allows the audience to get to know Reggie beyond her medical problems, and she becomes the beating heart of the play. The play resists having a protagonist, but attention is funneled toward Reggie’s view of things, and we watch her reactions to others, in part due to Pilgrim’s humorous, understated performance.
Denise (Patrice Johnson Chevannes, left) explains a skin graft to Reggie. Photographs by Ahron R. Foster.
When Toby (Patrick Vaill) enters he seems intent on isolation—he’s nonplussed by Anna’s phone conversations and puts his jacket over his head. Jordan (Glenn Fitzgerald) and Liane (Emily Cass McDonnell), a married couple, arrive from Ohio, with palpable tension between them. Jordan is sullen and short-tempered, unable to summon up any compassion for his wife’s very serious, and long-untreated, condition. The source of the animosity between them isn’t entirely clear—there’s a ketamine joke, so perhaps Jordan is just too mired in his own depression to care? In one of the play’s less believable moments, a medicated Liane is saved from falling over by Toby, to whom she then immediately confesses an extramarital affair.
When Clyde (Peter Gerety) enters and buys sunflower seeds and starts offering them around, especially insistent to Reggie, it’s clear why Denise was happy to have him on the day’s schedule. Gerety nails the character’s ambling loquacity—a bit of a know-it-all, but harmless, and his sense of knowingness seems earned, as this is his yearly pilgrimage to the clinic to have another part of his face sliced away.
When Toby’s mother, Paula (Laura Esterman), shows up and starts spouting holistic New Age nonsense, essentially blaming Toby for his pre-melanoma, it isn’t long before Clyde speaks up, much to the delight of the audience. Paula’s worldview clearly has a grip on Toby, and the almost miraculously clean bill of health he receives after his mother’s performance on healing bowls, greeted with prescient skepticism by Clyde, sends him more fully into her grasp.
Toby (Patrick Vaill, right) and his meddling, New Age mother, Paula (Laura Esterman), eat lunch in the waiting room.
The play avoids excessive sentimentality, yet highlights small moments of connection. It seems Clyde might stay around with Reggie, but he leaves when his problem is taken care of. The same later for Reggie with Liane, who has an eye removed and has nowhere to go after Jordan absconds. These are fine moments, when compassion runs up against reality, and they are more effective than the forced denouement between Denise and Jonathan. Gardner’s wonderful 2018 play Athena was primarily a two-hander, with each of the characters brought vividly to life; here there are nine characters and 90 minutes, and some of them feel cursory. There are terrific naturalistic, dramatic moments. But Adams never finds a sustained tone, and there is the feeling that one is watching snippets from various potential plays.
I’m Revolting runs through Oct. 16 at the Atlantic Theater (Linda Gross Theater, 336 W 20th St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. on Tuesday and Thursday and at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. Tickets are available by visiting atlantictheater.org.
