‘The Quality of Life’ pits ideal against real
2007 play takes on end-of-life questions
All their worldly possessions are gone — burned up along with their home in a fire. Still, Jeanette and Neil are trying to make the most of their sad set-up, which includes living in a tent. Then, family members going through their own tragedy come to visit.
“The Quality of Life” follows Jeanette and Neil, who also are dealing with Neil’s terminal cancer, and their interactions with a second couple, Bill and Dinah, Jeanette’s cousin whose daughter recently died.
As the couples cope with their personal losses, they also have to learn to confront their political differences; Dinah and Bill are conservative Midwesterners, while Jeanette and Neil are “post-hippie” Californians with political views to match.
New Mexico Actors Lab’s production of the play, a 2007 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle award-winner by Jane Anderson, opens this weekend and will continue until July 2.
The story shifts when Jeanette, the character who is seemingly taking her lumps with the most positive outlook, reveals she plans on killing herself to die alongside her cancer-ridden husband, angering her cousins.
“Part of me thinks the [audience is] going to dislike her at first, like, ‘How can you make such a choice? How dare you, to empathize with her?’” said Barbara Hatch, the Actors Lab’s producing director, who also plays Jeanette. “They need to empathize with all of these characters because they all have and are going through something really tragic.”
The play tackles provocative end-of-life questions, as well as other divisive issues, including religion and recreational and medicinal drug use. Those involved in the Actors Lab’s production want people to leave reflecting on those topics and their own points of view.
“It doesn’t take a position and treats each side of the positions relatively fairly,” said Robert Benedetti, Actors Lab founder and “The Quality of Life’s” codirector. “It raises more questions than it answers and each character has an arc where they end up in a radically different place than where they began.”
Nicholas Ballas, the other co-director, who also plays Neil, can relate to his character — he’s a 10-year cancer survivor. He wanted to do the play because it tackles the couples’ differences in a humorous or light-hearted way and it also shatters the notion that Jeanette’s plan is as “beautiful” as she initially thinks, and she eventually has to confront it.
“One of the central conflicts of this play is the ideal versus the real, and how one imagines it can be done so seamlessly and romantically but,
when it comes down to it, it’s brutally hard,” said Ballas.
To continue the conversations the play can prompt, discussion with Glenys Carl, founder of the Coming Home Connection, will follow both Sunday performances. Coming Home Connection provides free end-of-life care for low-income, uninsured and other groups.
“Theaters need to serve their communities in ways outside of the theater they’re doing,” Benedetti said about adding the audience discussions.
Other cast members in “The Quality of Life” include Jody Durham and Patrick Briggs.