March Reading; “The Committee Committee”

Bit of a strange diversion this month, but there’s method in the madness. I’ve been hopping through quite a few books in my background research that share a common thread of referencing/being influenced by Lewis Hyde’s “The Gift.” If you’ve been with the Patreon for a while, you know that book left a big dent in me, so tracing those networks made by his ideas has been really rewarding. Interestingly, one of the source topics he evokes has also popped up in many of my recent readings - even those with seemingly no connection to Lewis Hyde. And so this month I thought I’d let kismet take the wheel and look at a topic with no clue yet what it has to do with me: let’s talk organ donors.

“The God Committee”

by Mark St Germain, 2017

Mark St Germain dramatizes the process by which a panel of doctors decides who will receive an organ ready for transplant. Now, if you have spent a life watching or making theater, you a) may be entitled to financial compensation for damages and b) probably can already guess how this will go down: naive/inexperienced young doctor stands in as proxy for audience, allowing exposition dumps. Heightened / unlikely settings allows all the potential conflicts to arise. Characters withhold, deceive, break under pressure and dramatically reveal. There’s a priest somehow!

To wit; it’s very theatrical, and very “stage play about a medical/scientific question.” While I’ve often (viciously) mocked those in the past (don’t get me started on Copenhagen…), for what it is, it isn’t bad—St. Germain knows what he’s trying to do, and he does it. Instead, I’m finding this an interesting entry point to these topics for all the ways it feels so distant from what I want my work to accomplish.

Here’s to reading via negativa!

Related Readings

“The God Committee”

Directed by Austin Stark, 2021

An adaptation of the play, for those of you whose preferred content delivery method is film/Coleman Domingo (as well it should be). I wanted to give the play a second chance, and to receive it aloud, rather than just on the page between my eye rolls.

“God Committee”

This American Life, 2021

Why yes, I am immensely pleased with myself that I found 3 separate recommendations that all have the same name. In truth, this episode comes closest of the three to rising to the level of that title - producer Lilly Sullivan tells the story of the unlikely panel of “ordinary people” formed to decide who would receive a new and severely limited life-saving medical procedure. This is one of those stories that really made a mark on me when I first heard it, and that gets at the real fundamental messiness of how big choices get made.