THE DOCTOR at THE PARK AVENUE ARMORY
In Robert Icke’s The Doctor, a teenage girl lies in a private hospital after a botched abortion. She is about to die. When a priest arrives to perform last rites, the girl’s doctor stops him at the door. The priest would be administering a last confession, to beg for forgiveness and admission into Heaven. Dr. Wolff protects her patient from all that—from the priest “walking in like the Grim Reaper.”
A secular Jew, Dr. Ruth Wolff is criticized for being insensitive to religious observance. Played by the brilliant and resilient Juliet Stevenson, the doctor knows that she is in the right and so does the audience. In the play’s second half, she’s brought to her knees and forced to hear her actions condemned at length in a tribunal. (Though it has nothing on BAM’s five hour The Iceman Cometh, The Doctor is nearly three hours.)
And yet, the highlight of the season is watching Juliet Stevenson put through the wringer in the sold-out The Doctor at the historic Park Avenue Armory. It has been twenty years since New York theatre audiences have had a chance to see her magic. Stevenson is best known and loved for her astonishing role in the 1990 movie Truly, Madly, Deeply, with co-star Alan Rickman.
Icke’s The Doctor is about identity, too. Make no assumptions. White actor John Mackay plays a priest who is Black. We are told one character who presents as female is actually male. Jaime Schwarz plays a colleague expected to defend Dr. Wolff, who shockingly tells her off in private. Each part is difficult, but the ensemble makes it so real that you expect to see the doctors adjourn at some point for coffee and donuts.
A drum set high above the stage contributes dramatically (Hannah Ledwidge) to this drama inspired by an obscure 1912 play from Vienna about a doctor and a priest.
