on the cover / By Hank Sims

Dr. Ring’s Single-Payer Puppet Show

In Ring’s play, Maria is a young doctor booted out of her job by an HMO administrator on the grounds that she is not cost-effective — she orders too many tests for her patients, and cares for them too well. She sees an ad seeking a doctor for a rural clinic in Massachusetts. Having heard of the health care reform in that state, she eagerly sets out. Once installed she meets up with the “Von Trapped” family, a struggling single father with a set of conjoined quintuplets, each of which has a different medical condition. There’s a chronically stoned hippie, a crusading investigative reporter, and various buffoons and lackeys and dopes. Through her new neighbors, Maria comes to realize that the Massachusetts model is not the pretty picture of reform it seems. She and the Von Trappeds attempt to escape over the hills into Canada.

The bigwig executives embrace the Massachusetts model as their last, best hope, and nearly convince a pliant Barack Obama to accept their style of reform. Obama wistfully wishes for a movement to come along and push for national health, but goes along with the executives’ decision to bar advocates of a single payer system from his policy summit on health care reform. (This is an echo of Obama’s actual policy summit, which occurred in late February.) All appears lost. But …

The Sunday run-through, with the theatrically untrained health care professionals and activists manipulating and voicing the parts, was undeniably shaky. Between acts, there was much debate about whose hands should go where, and how the props might be manipulated without them falling off the stage. But the play has already developed a life of its own. Advocacy groups similar to the one in Humboldt County have formed throughout the nation, and two such groups, ones based in Albuquerque and San Francisco, have asked for copies of the script.

“For me, making the puppets was really, really fun,” Ring says, sitting for a moment in the sun outside the Arcata Community Center after her presentation. “It stopped being fun around the last two puppets, but I just kept going.”

She and her troupe have a lot of work ahead of them. The next fun thing, presumably, will be seeing the results.

The Sound of Moolah is currently scheduled to show at 8 p.m. on Saturday, April 25, at 8 p.m. in the Labor Temple (840 E St., Eureka) and at 6 p.m. on Sunday, May 17, at the Westhaven Center for the Arts (501 S. Westhaven Dr., Westhaven). Additional dates and locations are planned throughout the summer.

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