By Kailyn Jennings
Staff Writer
Luckily, the average student spends more time worrying about midterms and essays than dire diseases and rising prescription costs. Many students aren’t preoccupied with health care because they are covered by their parents’ insurance or pay to be covered by St. Bonaventure’s coverage.
“Mercy Killers,” a one-man play by Michael Milligan, illustrates one man’s struggle to support his wife while working a blue-collar job after she is diagnosed with cancer while being uninsured. The high cost of health care turns his life upside down and leads him to question his patriotism in the land of the free.
A free showing of “Mercy Killers” will take place in the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts on Thursday, Oct. 10 at 7:30 p.m.
“Mercy Killers” has been performed across the country. Ticket prices for performances follow a “pay-what-you-want” model because the goal is to increase awareness of the national health care debate and the devastating effects that arise with high costs. No one who wants to host a performance is turned away for a lack of funds. Support, not money, is the request.
Athena Godet-Calogeras said she worked to bring the theater performance to the St. Bonaventure campus and surrounding community in hopes that it would spark discussion.
Godet-Calogeras worked with community members, St. Bonaventure faculty and medical professionals to sponsor the broad-based, grassroots performance. They saw it as not only good theater, but as good information – an incentive to give the health care law a chance and to perfect it to promote greater health care justice and coverage.
Athena’s husband and Franciscan Studies professor Dr. Jean-François Godet-Calogeras, said the focus of the play is on the human costs that surface when people find themselves drowning in medical payments.
“It is St. Francis Week, and ‘Mercy Killers’ is about compassion and seeing society work for everyone rather than individualism,” he said.
