Ahron R. Foster
In the play I’m Revolting (Atlantic Theatre Company, to Oct. 16) it is just another day in a New York skin cancer clinic, some time in December 2019. It isn’t the leading skin cancer clinic, we are told—which immediately tells us something that is already known all too well by the patients we are about to meet. We meet a senior doctor, Denise (Patrice Johnson Chevannes), and her junior Jonathan (Bartley Booz), as they prepare for a day of inpatients by briefly scanning their nameless treatment biographies.
Jonathan wordlessly erects a cardboard mannequin sent in by some medical reps—with a smiling figure advertising a new medication. “No surgery needed” is the bright promise this medication offers.
For the 90 minutes of Gracie Gardner’s affecting gem of a play, directed by Knud Adams, the advertisement is proven a graphic lie: We see patients facing the prospect of surgery, questioning diagnoses and treatment plans, or undergoing surgery and experiencing its physical and psychological aftermaths. The double-meaning title of the play refers to how some of the characters may (partly) feel about themselves, and also how they are facing what they are going through—and the medical care they are being offered in this, a place they know not to be the best but the only port of call they can afford or access.