My Friday evening started out with a typical hospital, linoleum floors, dull curtains… a sense of boredom.  Upon this canvas the vivid portrait of a tortured soul came bursting out with an explosion of monologues, insanity and strangely, a disco ball.  The theatrical painting I so favorably speak of is …Being Patient, a one-woman show acted, written, and choreographed by Kelly Samara at the TBG Theatre.

Our heroine emerges.  Her drab smock belies the interesting mind of a mental patient with plenty of opinions, either tempered or twisted by her dependence on painkillers, about the world around her.  She opens the show with a rant about various hospital staff including, but not limited to the confused nurse, adulterous doctor, and a little bit about her next door (or is it curtain?) neighbor Leonard.  Then she goes on about a 300lb woman who got stuck in an MRI machine.

After a while something strange and unexpected happens:  small dots of light started moving around the room and loud music starts playing.  It took me a second, but I saw that the lights were reflected of a disco ball and that our lone actor had started dancing with.  This short spurt of energy was accompanied by deafening music and dance moves that seemed to reflect her chaotic mind.

One of her more interesting discourses was on the paradox of the gown. The nurse says that it is open at the back for “Easy removal in case of emergency.”  Our lone star’s biggest problem is that it leaves her rear end in the open, and although she understands emergencies, she doesn’t know “In what emergency will my ass be the center of treatment.”  This is truly a mystery of the ages.  Never fear, our heroine has found the appropriate name for the perplexing raiment:  “the backward smock.”

But enough fashion talk.

Some of her rants are actually enlightening.  Take for example the issue of amusement.  There are million-dollar parks built around the word itself, but it is just a distraction from real life.  Shouldn’t we be cherishing our life instead of running away from it?  Here’s another one:  why do people have children?  It shouldn’t be because we find ourselves guilty with what we have or haven’t done.  We shouldn’t use reproduction as redemption.  You give back so much to other people, you can change lives through the relations you have with people.  These discourses and so many others interrupted by scenes of frantic dancing make the painkiller-fueled fantasies of a deluded woman look like a trip to enlightenment.

This play was a look into the mind of a woman living on the 11th floor of a hospital, but instead we found a mind that reached beyond the sterile ward of the said hospital, and extended straight into the complex simplicities (got that?) of love and relationships that we take for granted. What Friedrich Nietzsche said was right:  “You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.”