Nursing

The play I have chosen to work with is The Hallway Trilogy, Part III: "Nursing" by Adam Rapp. Rapp graduated from St. Johns Military Academy. To watch "The Hallway Trilogy" by Adam Rapp is to enter an alternate universe. (New York Times 2011) I completely agree with this quote. While reading it, I thought I was reading an episode of black mirror, and that's why I chose this play. In this play, there are no more horrible diseases killing humans. Every disease is both preventable and curable. However, the disease still exists in The Mary Ellen Baird Museum of Disease and Nursing. Mary Ellen Baird was a pediatrics, prison, and hospice nurse who spent thirty‐five years taking care of people before she died from a rare form of cancer at 55. She passed away two years before the cure of cancer was discovered, and her son opened the museum in honor of her. The play focuses in on the main exhibit of a man named Lloyd Boyd, who has willingly signed up to be injected with horrible diseases and cured to then repeat the process with the next disease. The first diseases he is injected with are the bubonic plague and cholera. While reading the play, you can tell he's in a ton of pain. He puts himself through so much torture for some reason, and no matter how bad it is, he doesn't care. We never find out the real reason he subjects himself to this torture, but considering some of the conversations he had with the guard and Nurses, I think he did some horrible stuff in his past, and he feels so guilty that he's tormenting himself. If there is a lesson, I didn't pick up on it because I understand the play, but I don't think I learned anything from it. This play is existential. The main characters are Lloyd, the nurse Andy, the guard, and the tour guide. Lloyd wants to suffer and mess with the people around him. Andy has a crush on Lloyd and wats to keep talking to him. Joan wants to break Lloyd out. I'll be playing Lloyd, but I'm not entirely sure what scene I'm doing yet, but it will most likely be the scene at the beginning where Lloyd is talking to the guard. In the scene, Lloyd wants to speak to the guard, and I think the guard wants to talk to him too, but he wants to appear annoyed with Lloyd. In this scene, we find out that Lloyd has a troubling past. Lloyds given circumstances are he fought in Afghanistan, his mom is old and doesn't remember him, he's suicidal, he used to be homeless, he left the mother of his child.