American comic Stacy Price brings her solo show, Citizen Otherplace, to the Fringe, and it is a satirical sweep at the healthcare system in the United States. She explains the health insurance, add-ons, and extras that come with a system that can cost the patient hundreds of thousands of dollars.
As the audience members ‘check in’ with Price’s efficient administrator, they all become part of this hospital system, flagged by just a curtain representing a cubicle, from which she appears as a variety of characters from the patient – identified by a number, of course – to a disinterested doctor. Each character is more uncomfortable than the last.
Is the system as it stands in the USA a simple money-grab, an efficient way to provide healthcare, or as broken as some claim the NHS is in the UK? Price creates a medical debt collector called ‘Mike’ to highlight the absurdity of a system that calculates the worst moments in a person’s life for profit.
Citizen Otherplace takes on a structure something like an escape game with tests as it progresses, with strident music, unsettling light work, and audience interaction. “Why can’t I go back to taking really bad care of myself?”, posits Price in her patient guise, before morphing into something much more sinister.
There is a serious message here about the availability of life-saving care when you are unable to pay the bill. What we in the UK take for granted – a suspicious lump will be investigated thoroughly through a set of tests, and may be fixed by surgery and medication – is out of reach for most average Americans.
“We have no time for fear”, states Price as she chats with the audience about the medical system. In the UK, we have waiting lists, but we get there. Those with money can bypass the system and seek private medical care. In the US, the barrier is not time, but finance. Just because something is legal doesn’t make it right.
Making every audience member find a bill under their seat and then think about what they need to liquidate to fund it – a car, a house – or start a payment plan is a sobering way to make the point of what Citizen Otherplace is saying. An audience member suggests “selling a kidney”, another focuses on “GoFundMe” – apparently a popular choice.
In Price’s thesis, taken from Susan Sontag’s 1978 Illness as Metaphor, the idea that every person dwells in “the kingdom of the well” and “the kingdom of the sick” during their lives is very direct, and true for the vast majority of us. She takes this to surreal levels through her characters and leaves us with a strong warning about what might await us in the not-so-distant future.
4 stars.
Citizen Otherplace was part of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.
For more about Stacy Price, follow her on Instagram.
I reviewed this show from a recording supplied by Stacy’s PR.