Review: A Doctor's Visit by Annika Lekven, Broad Theatre, Austin
by Michael Meigs

Annikka Leven's A Doctor's Visit leaves you feeling puzzled. What, exactly, happened within all of the encounters whispered about, alleged, listened to, intuited, or rumored? How far can you trust your own perceptions or those of others? What if your own synapses are short circuiting instead or someone—maybe you?—is tipping into paranoia?

 

 

The structure of the story reflects those uncertainties. Both the opening scene and the final one occur in the examining room of Dr. Harris, a male OB-GYN, where a nervous young woman is readying herself for a pelvic exam and Papp smear. We in the audience assume that this unnamed character played by Amara Johnson will be the protagonist. Harris's female physician's assistant stands silent in the background, mostly occupied with charts and desk items. The patient's uncertainty infuses the scene with acute tension even though the doctor's behavior is entirely courteous and routine. Beau Paul as the physician is quiet and impersonal; Joy, the PA portrayed by J. Bailey Parks is so self-effacing as to be almost invisible. 

 

HALT! Dim lights, freeze action in the examining room, listen as the anonymous patient steps forward, addresses the audience in give-and-take. With the assistance of another female actor and a puffy pink construction almost three feet across, she provides a boisterous, cartoon version of the physical exam of a patient's labia, genitalia, and cervex. Barks of laughter (mostly from the women in the audience) and some squirms of Too Much Information (mostly from the men in attendance). The women lecturing and demonstrating detach the object from where it's hanging on the a forward rail and disappear into the wings.

 

The focus then shifts to Joy, the physician's assistant. A new arrival and single mother who moved to the city about six months earlier with her daughter Nina, who attends a highly rated new-age school thanks to a partial scholarship. Joy's feeling the financial strain, but she hopes it's worth it eventually to secure her teen daughter a place at a good university. Joy's beginning to feel at home with others at the clinic, relaxing with other PAs in the break room.

 

 

From this point forward, hints, complaints, and accusations will torment Joy. Nina's been punching a boy at school; she says he's been touching her between her legs. Other female PAs gossip about one another, get fed up with the highly emotional PA (Shelby Surdum) who can't stand the sight and smell of vomit, drop hints about Dr. Harris ("Everybody knows . . ."), athough her six months of employment Joy hasn't seen anything untoward.

 

How can you be sure of what's true? Overhead fluorescents in the clinic occasionally blink but Joy's the only one who notices. Joy takes Nina's complaint of abuse to the hippy dippy principal of the school, where Sybil, mother of the accused, refuses to believe her. The principal's investigation fails to corroborate Nina's earnest version. Nina is sentenced to a week's detention. She feels betrayed by her mother, who doesn't know whom to believe.

 

Outside the clinic, Joy speaks to Dr. Harris, who has come out for a secret smoke. Now it's the theatre lighting that gets erratic, but the good doctor doesn't perceive the interruptions.

 

The final scene is the first scene, once again.

 

Rarely is it necessary or appropriate for a reviewer to detail a plot so fully. Plot is usually a device, a mechanism, to deliver a story. In Lekven's script the plot becomes an interrupted, direction changing, abrupt way of asserting that determining and delivering truth is all too often not possible. If pushed to the extreme, this theme resembles philospher BIshop Berkeley's 1710 absolutist contention that nothing exists outside the mind; if it's not perceived, it doesn't exist.

 

The playwright and company don't go that far. By beginning and ending in the tension of that exam room, they emphasize that this dilemma afflicts women far more than men. Women's perceptions are challenged more often than men's; after all, who has ever heard of "womansplaining"?

 

Within these constraints, director Molly Fonseca and the cast do create entirely believable characters. Lekven's dialogue crackles, surprises, and reveals character. J. Bailey Parks as Joy is sincere, concerned, and proactive; in his stolid, perhaps unhappy passivity, Beau Paul is convincing as the weary physician being maligned behind his back. Doubling and tripling of roles accomplishes economy of casting and highlights the versatility of performers. As a caustic, annoyed PA in the break room, Jennifer Jennings delivers a comic portrayal that's delicious but precisely trimmed so as not to be laugh-aloud funny; as that hippy dippy principal, she goes over the top, impelled by the playwright, then whips into an icily judgmental authority. Triply cast, Shelby Surdam morphs from a near-hysterical PA reminiscent of her role in Lekven's Hungry Teenage Trackstars to a regally offended mother to a good-ole-girl mommy. And there's young Ionie Olivia Nieves as Nina, the perhaps victim, perhaps aggressor, whose reticence, embarrassement, and feelings of betrayal radiate from her expression and posture.

 

None of the company participants or characters can solve the problem they raise. Instead, they communicate it to us, whether we're knowing or unaware. This is a deftly indirect warning to watch out when our own inner lights start flickering.

 

EXTRA

Click here to view the program of Broad Theatre's A Doctor's Visit

 

 

 

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A Doctor's Visit
by Annika Lekven
Broad Theatre

November 6 - 22, 2025

Hyde Park Theatre, Guadalupe at 43rd St., Austin