Who Lives? A Play edition by Christopher Meeks Arts Photography eBooks
Download As PDF : Who Lives? A Play edition by Christopher Meeks Arts Photography eBooks 
This drama is based on a real event. In the early 1960s, an anonymous committee of ordinary citizens in Seattle selected kidney disease victims from a pool for an experiment with something new a kidney dialysis machine. If the experiment worked, a small number of people would live instead of surely die from kidney failure. But who among the pool lives? How will the committee choose? Playwright Christopher Meeks centers the action on one person, attorney Gabriel Hornstein, who desperately needs what the committee offers.
This morality tale races against time and asks what is a life worth? What criteria should this committee and ones today use? Race, gender, net worth, family size, career, what? For readers who like moral issues and real drama, this play will get you involved.
As Los Angeles Times theatre critic David C. Nichols said of the play's most recent production in Los Angeles, "Those who have personal experience with its topic should perhaps bring Kleenex."
Who Lives? A Play edition by Christopher Meeks Arts Photography eBooks
Christopher Meeks made a stunning impression as a writer of short stories in his collection THE MIDDLE-AGED MAN AND THE SEA published in 2005, an author who is not only observant of the little things that propel us through living but also as a man closely in touch with all the senses. Now he has published in book form his 1997 play WHO LIVES? and once again he ranks as a talent to watch. Note: the term 'At Rise' in a manuscript for a play indicates the curtain or the lights going up to open the experience of a story, yet here it can also be used to indicate the intensity of Meeks' substantial gifts as a writer, a playwright, and a craftsman.The story of the play, presented here in script form yet happily free of the many action indications usually found in scripts as asides that paralyze the movement of the eye through the meat of the story, is terse, tight, economical, and packs a wallop - even as a reader. No stumbling blocks, here, just propulsive story telling (think Tennessee Williams, William Inge, or even Shakespeare). Yes, the mellow secrets of the visual representation of the play's mechanics are present - double stage settings for the immediate story and for the committee input with accompanying lighting cues that allow us to understand how the characters interact between the personal and the group.
1963 is the year. Kidney Dialysis is a new machine that can prolong the lives of patients with renal failure, the beginnings of the entire field of kidney transplantation. Seattle is the place where a hospital is beginning to offer dialysis to candidates, and because of the plethora of potential candidates, a committee has been chosen to review all possible recipients - a thumbs up or thumbs down as to whether applicants live or die. Not a committee on which many would like to serve. But the main character of the story is one Gabriel Hornstein, a Jewish lawyer married to a Christian wife Margaret, whose marriage is rocky at best given the demanding personality of Gabriel. When out of the blue Gabriel is diagnosed with kidney failure he is outraged, pounding his fists at the heavens, until he hears of the Dialysis machine: he of course immediately demands he be placed on the life preserving apparatus despite the fact that his physician tells him there is a waiting list. Gabriel coerces his physician to be placed on the machine, and because of the inherent life/death decisions made by the 'committee' (a priest, a union labor leader, a college student, a businessman, and a housewife) Gabriel demands there be a broader range of opinions on this decision body. Gabriel is placed on the committee as 'patient responder' and his physician is placed on the committee as 'care giver'.
The committee reviews candidates requesting dialysis: a black violinist for the Seattle Symphony, and accountant, etc. The thunder of Meeks' drama is the dialogue that occurs in the ethical, racial, religious, arts value to society, political, the right to die and eventually in the transformation of the members of the committee as they each grow from the heinous task of deciding 'acceptable patients'. And in the end it is the acerbic Gabriel who climaxes the play with a surprising decision.
Christopher Meeks continues to impress (he has other plays under his belt), but this reader is hungry for the next novel (or even another collection of short stories) which really seems to be his premiere métier. Highly recommended for reading: highly recommended for performances in schools, community theaters - and there is even a screenplay obviously present in this book format...Grady Harp, January 07
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Who Lives? A Play edition by Christopher Meeks Arts Photography eBooks Reviews
I read `The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea` by Christopher Meeks, and I loved it, so I also bought `Who Lives?`
I thought this was it! This play helps us Japanese audience see and think deeply about life and responsibility. I'll recommend it to anyone to read and any drama groups to perform. Someday I hope Yokohama Theatre Group can perform this show.
In the book, the author's simple and clear language opened up the complex human decision-making story. I've trusted the read throughout although not always on the characters or the decisions. This play makes me think, and what a pleasure that is!
Keiko Amano
Communication Director
Yokohama Theatre Group, Japan
Yeah, it's not often in life that you come across an author who can pull out the literary stops not once, twice, or thrice in a row. I puff you not, babies, but I've already begun to lose count of the streak of unparalleled good turns writer Chistopher Meeks has released into the idea marketplace. My goodness...my head is all aflutter just with ***feedback*** after my latest read of Meeks' latest fictive cut, WHO LIVES?
My feelings are that when you read a book, you don't want to simply go through the motions. You're not interested--at least I'm not, m'kay?--in having your eyes flit from left to right across the page--or right to left if you're reading WHO LIVES? in either its Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Pashtu, or Hebrew translations--randomly taking in words and sentences like the act of reading is some mid-afternoon commute from your ball and chain cubicle job back home to the 'burbs where the smell of cut grass, lemonade, and pot roast awaits you (about the closest thing to a sensory assault in the 'burbs).
No, I say.
Rather, you want the words from the books you read to touch you somewhere deep within your soul, if you've got one. You want to walk away feeling ethereal, light, and on a cloud with a certain identifying digit because that's what you bargained for with Christopher Meeks. You know this because you've already been reading Mr. Meeks' stuff for some time, and you wouldn't expect any less from the award-winning LA Times-reviewed playwright and novelist. Now would you?
But let's take the hypothetical example for the moment for all you naysayers out there that you've never heard of the "Meekster" before.
Let's say that you were ambling about at your favorite Powell's in Portland somewhere on the Left Coast, and you had some spare moments and change on hand rushing between squash matches to seek out a stimulating read. You come across this wicked alfalfa "tentacular" cover on the shelves towards the back somewhere and so you dip into your corduroys to treat yourself generously. Would you buy WHO LIVES?
I say you totally would, babies. Why?
Well it's because Meeks drills down like an Alberta oil sandsman to the sometimes crass realities of life we're all mortal, we're all going to get sick at some future date, and we're all going to need critical medical care because the world's going to hell in a handbasket.
Who will be there for you when the time comes to meet your maker?
Who will attend to your every need when your robustness and vigor are things you can no longer sustain, when you're leaning over the bed in agony in your semi-private room, begging for a sign from something holier than thou, that someone be there for you when the bell tolls?
These are the concerns Meeks contemplates in this tale, as contemporary in two-double-oh-seven as it was back in those terribly decadent eighties, when our gluttonous cravings for all things material outstripped our basic common sense and restraint.
At no other time have Meeks' words been a virtual clarion--nay, a summons!--to remedy our decadent ways, to look beside ourselves to care for our fellows as if their various sufferings were our very own. In our precarious times, babies, where life turns on the fulcrum of a meager veneer of security, we must all heed his message. Meeks tells you this in his characteristic plain speech and with his harmonic level tone, the underlying message being that may you never need to hear what he has to say spoken louder than a whisper. Keep the message in the back of your grey matter, he entreats, because the Piper might soon be coming for his due.
Words, babies, words. Meeks doesn't club them over you like some ooga-booga neanderthal from the Paleolithic Age, hoping through some good old-fashioned elblow grease and fancy hocus-pocus tricks that you're going to grasp the core notion of his literary premise.
No siree. No such luck.
Meeks is rather a true craftsman of the artform. He's been there and back and always manages to draw freshly from the well. When you've seen and done as much as Christopher Meeks seems to have done in life, the need to dazzle and devastate with prose is as facile as a college frat trick.
Instead, think Baryshnikov, babies. Ballet. Grace, levity, and precision.
If you don't read this book, you can then of course buy into the alternatives. Just don't blame me if the environmentalists come pounding on your door for having over-consumed your quota of fossil fuels in the long trip back to the shop just to return your copy of That Other Piece of Er, Fiction in exchange for Christopher Meeks' WHO LIVES?
This man is definitely onto something here. Please don't deny yourself the opportunity of finding out what.
Hand on the heart,
--ADM in Prague
Christopher Meeks made a stunning impression as a writer of short stories in his collection THE MIDDLE-AGED MAN AND THE SEA published in 2005, an author who is not only observant of the little things that propel us through living but also as a man closely in touch with all the senses. Now he has published in book form his 1997 play WHO LIVES? and once again he ranks as a talent to watch. Note the term 'At Rise' in a manuscript for a play indicates the curtain or the lights going up to open the experience of a story, yet here it can also be used to indicate the intensity of Meeks' substantial gifts as a writer, a playwright, and a craftsman.
The story of the play, presented here in script form yet happily free of the many action indications usually found in scripts as asides that paralyze the movement of the eye through the meat of the story, is terse, tight, economical, and packs a wallop - even as a reader. No stumbling blocks, here, just propulsive story telling (think Tennessee Williams, William Inge, or even Shakespeare). Yes, the mellow secrets of the visual representation of the play's mechanics are present - double stage settings for the immediate story and for the committee input with accompanying lighting cues that allow us to understand how the characters interact between the personal and the group.
1963 is the year. Kidney Dialysis is a new machine that can prolong the lives of patients with renal failure, the beginnings of the entire field of kidney transplantation. Seattle is the place where a hospital is beginning to offer dialysis to candidates, and because of the plethora of potential candidates, a committee has been chosen to review all possible recipients - a thumbs up or thumbs down as to whether applicants live or die. Not a committee on which many would like to serve. But the main character of the story is one Gabriel Hornstein, a Jewish lawyer married to a Christian wife Margaret, whose marriage is rocky at best given the demanding personality of Gabriel. When out of the blue Gabriel is diagnosed with kidney failure he is outraged, pounding his fists at the heavens, until he hears of the Dialysis machine he of course immediately demands he be placed on the life preserving apparatus despite the fact that his physician tells him there is a waiting list. Gabriel coerces his physician to be placed on the machine, and because of the inherent life/death decisions made by the 'committee' (a priest, a union labor leader, a college student, a businessman, and a housewife) Gabriel demands there be a broader range of opinions on this decision body. Gabriel is placed on the committee as 'patient responder' and his physician is placed on the committee as 'care giver'.
The committee reviews candidates requesting dialysis a black violinist for the Seattle Symphony, and accountant, etc. The thunder of Meeks' drama is the dialogue that occurs in the ethical, racial, religious, arts value to society, political, the right to die and eventually in the transformation of the members of the committee as they each grow from the heinous task of deciding 'acceptable patients'. And in the end it is the acerbic Gabriel who climaxes the play with a surprising decision.
Christopher Meeks continues to impress (he has other plays under his belt), but this reader is hungry for the next novel (or even another collection of short stories) which really seems to be his premiere métier. Highly recommended for reading highly recommended for performances in schools, community theaters - and there is even a screenplay obviously present in this book format...Grady Harp, January 07
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