Medical Readers' Theater: A Guide and Scripts (review)

Medical Readers’ Theater, edited by Todd L. Savitt, consists of fourteen theater scripts adapted from short stories about physicians and patients, medical practice, ethical and social issues in medical care, and medical and social aspects of aging and chronic disease. They are intended for medical students who perform them for public audiences. Following each performance, a discussion leader is supposed to prompt those in attendance to consider the issues raised in the play. Each script begins with a suggested seating plan for the script readers and some notes about how the material is best presented; each concludes with some suggested discussion questions.

The Readers’ Theater Program began in 1988 with a grant from the North Carolina Humanities Council. Three medical schools in the state sent students to perform the stories before community groups. The program continues at East Carolina University, and thanks to this book, it can be inaugurated at other institutions. Savitt gives careful instructions on how the material is to be performed—including brief stage directions and suggestions on what performers should wear—and he offers tips on finding audiences by reaching out to existing organizations and community groups. The job of the discussion leader is carefully detailed because the purpose of the performance is not to provide entertainment, but to elicit an exchange of ideas. The program, he explains, “is to provide a forum where citizens can consider and examine their own and others’ views on issues of common concern in the medical world” (p. xix). Those who attend will be “sharing personal and sometimes painful experiences and debating points of contention” (p. xix).

Seven of the fourteen scripts are adapted from the stories of two well-known physician writers: William Carlos Williams and Richard Seltzer. Two scripts are from stories by Susan Onthank Mates; the other authors are Pearl Buck, Arthur Conan Doyle, Katherine Anne Porter, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Margaret Lamb. The adaptations are effective, but are no substitutes for the original stories. The audience might therefore be given guidance on how to locate the original pieces should their interest be piqued.

Clearly, Medical Readers’ Theater is an essential book for those involved in the education of medical students and looking for ways to bring students and citizens together to discuss issues of mutual interest. The adaptation of William Carlos Williams’s “Old Doc Rivers” for example, offers a stirring account of a physician caught in the grips of addiction and viewed by townspeople with both respect for his abilities and disgust for the harm he inflicts. Performers and audience members alike can benefit from considering what is to be done with addicted practitioners by thinking about how patients in the story reacted with both pity and fear, while other doctors, for the most part, stood by, watched, and gossiped. Among the questions suggested for discussion are whether patients have realistic expectations of physicians and whether doctors’ private lives should matter to patients. The plays can be easily adapted to the undergraduate classroom. In a freshman honors seminar on Health and Society, we used several of the scripts to enhance class discussion. Pearl Buck’s story, “The Enemy,” which takes place during World War II and involves a Japanese physician caring for a white American soldier, was used in conjunction with Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (New York, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997) to address cultural issues in medicine. “Mistaken Charity,” by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, describes the placement of two independent elderly women in a retirement home. It was performed following the reading of Laurie Kaye Abraham’s Mama Might Be Better Off Dead: The Failure of Health Care in Urban America (Chicago...