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Chronic
by Linda Grifftiths
In the age of AIDS and SARS, mad cow, West
Nile and avian flu, when the very staffs of life—sex
and food and the air we breathe—can kill us, along comes
Linda Griffiths’ latest play. Ostensibly about CFS (chronic
fatigue syndrome) and the virus that may or may not cause
it, Chronic puts one woman’s dis-ease under
the theatrical microscope along with various other pathologies
of modern life. At first Petra seems familiarly neurotic,
a Woody Allen character refracted through George F. Walker.
But as Griffiths examines the psychological, social and sexual
dimensions of Petra’s experience in her desperate pursuit
of a cure, as well as her medical treatments, her strange
dreams, and the peculiarities of her post-industrial workplace,
the stage becomes an environmental petrie dish, a fascinating
experiment in the ecology of illness.
In Chronic Linda Griffiths has
written what she calls an “ecodrama,”tracing the
multitudinous connections and delicate balances linking the
seen and unseen, the present and past, the psychological,
physiological, technological and just plain illogical. Chronic
doesn’t show us a wasteland ravaged by fatal plagues
and self-inflicted poisons. Not yet. Just a girl who can’t
get better and a wisecracking virus and a ‘coupla martoonies’
after work.
—from the introduction by Jerry Wasserman
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