As the discussion resumes, Halperin's colleague, the oncologist, offers his thoughts, and then several cancer patients in the audience recount some of their experiences with the impersonal world of high-tech medicine. For the next ten minutes, the subject of doctors and how they practice medicine continues to hold center stage. Finally, a physician in the audience challenges those onstage and in the audience to look at Edson's work in a different way. The only character who 'gets it' is the one who's supposedly not that sharp, and that's the nurse. As he speaks, the audience erupts in spontaneous applause.
More hands flash up.
Behind him an elderly woman, who turns out to be the well-known children's writer Madeleine L'Engle, adds her emphatic agreement. The only healer in this drama is the nurse. Thanks to this exchange, the doctors finally begin to talk about what they can learn from caregiving and nursing. This belated consideration of caregiving illuminates much more than one audience's response to a successful Off Broadway play. Edson's play is almost unique in its reversal of the depiction of nursing we get on stage and screen, in literature and in the daily news.