Albee Play Sheds Light on Brooklyn’s Hospital Crisis In New Brooklyn Theater Production
“This is a semiprivate, white hospital,“ says The Nurse to a black man who has arrived with an accident victim in Edward Albee’s The Death of Bessie Smith, being presented by New Brooklyn Theatre for a brief two-weekend run at Interfaith Medical Center Hospital in Bedford-Stuyvesant. It’s a line that draws laughs in response to the absurdity of the remark, but the issues in play are dead serious. The play, an early one-act effort by an earnest young writer who was to come to full maturity in such works as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and A Delicate Balance, serves in this pared-down production as a site-specific vehicle to bring attention to the crisis being faced by Interfaith, struggling for its existence amid a cost-cutting frenzy that has put paid to at least 12 facilities in the metro area, including Greenwich Village’s much-lamented St. Vincent’s and Cobble Hill’s Long Island College Hospital.
January 14, 2014