Living Values The Play

Healthcare rationing rendered in iambic pentameter — a verse drama in five acts about who gets to live, who gets to decide, and the smooth meter of a system that never says no.Eleanor Mitchell, eighty-one, sits before a committee. Kind faces. Careful language. A jug of water and a box of tissues placed within reach. The committee speaks in perfect pentameter. Eleanor, dying, breaks the meter when she answers.Her grandson Daniel watches. He grieves. He writes a book about her death and sells it for a fortune. He investigates the system that killed her — the insurance committees, the compassionate counselors, the Transitions Alliance for Compassionate Care — and gradually his own verse smooths out, until by Act V he sounds exactly like the people who denied Eleanor treatment.Then his sister Caroline is the one in the chair.Living Values is a five-act verse drama in which the meter itself is the antagonist. Characters who accept the system speak in smooth iambic pentameter. Characters who resist break the meter. The play tracks Daniel's slow accommodation to the machinery — and asks whether anyone can stand outside it.Adapted by the author from the Living Values novel, this verse drama is designed for stage production and classroom use. Suitable for university theater programs, ethics curricula, and readers of contemporary verse drama.From Richard Warburg, author of Paying for Promises and the Red White & Blue Land series.