Houston playwright’s anger over mom’s well being care sparks ‘Dawn Coven’

Not a lot is occurring in Buckstop, Texas. It’s a type of locations that most individuals see solely on the way in which to someplace else, whereas to others it represents the top of the road. That is the milieu of Brendan Bourque-Sheil’s new play “Dawn Coven,” which begins previews Friday at Levels and opens March 31.

“What I used to be attempting to seize in Buckstop was the texture of one of many final nursing properties my mother was in,” says the Houston-based playwright and educator, “as a result of it was so lower off from the remainder of the medical system, and so unusual and kind of singular that it typically felt like a small city unto itself working semi-autonomously. And form of an absurd however very emotionally charged one.”

“Dawn Coven” arose after a surgical procedure of Bourque-Sheil’s mom’s went badly. Because the insurance coverage funds steadily dried up, “she received kind of kicked down the chain” to a progressively decrease commonplace of care that spanned rehab and specialty hospitals, nursing properties, and “much less well-funded nursing properties,” he says. This went on for 10 months.

“I used to be the first individual kind of visiting her day-after-day, and being the purpose of contact for docs and insurance coverage,” explains Bourque-Sheil, who additionally teaches at Kinder Excessive College for the Performing and Visible Arts and the Alley Theatre’s division of group engagement.

“I kind of received an unplanned tour of the American healthcare system — I noticed some health-care staff who had been miraculously resilient, after which I noticed different health-care staff who had been deeply burned out and resentful of their jobs,” he continues.

Because the months glided by, “I used to be starting to establish with the burnouts and questioning if there was a option to come again from burnout,” Bourque-Sheil says, “and I believe attempting to reply that query is what began me on the highway to writing that play.”

“Dawn Coven” revolves round Hallie, a nurse whom Borque-Sheil calls a composite of the numerous health-care staff he encountered who cared for his mom, stalwarts and burnouts alike. Regardless of the grim circumstances, he discovered them to be an unlikely however important supply of humor.

“One factor that I as a comedy nerd actually appreciated concerning the health-care staff who handled my mother is how humorous and the way able to chortle a whole lot of them had been, which you start to comprehend is only a basic coping technique for coping with that degree of sickness and ache day in and day trip,” he says. “And so it did not appear alien to the world; it appeared integral to the world to me.”

As Hallie loses her eyesight and her nurse’s license, her want to proceed tending to her aged sufferers leads her to enlist the native coven, headed up by a girl named Winter Moon. Bourque-Sheil was raised by a lesbian couple who had been additionally Wiccans, so he knew the territory.

“The depiction of witchcraft on this play is essentially primarily based on their observe,” he says. “Which got here up in my mother’s illness as a result of that was principally her religion, and so we’d often observe a winter solstice in a nursing residence. That fusion of witchcraft and medication appears intuitive to me in scripting this.”

Additionally creator of 2016’s “The E book of Maggie,” through which Judas Iscariot and Pontius Pilate attempt to enter heaven by speaking a girl out of suicide, Bourque-Sheil acknowledges “I do not appear to have the ability to write something apart from darkish comedy.” For his new play, he needed to steadiness that irreverence with a sure compassion for his characters.

“So whether or not I am speaking about small-town, rural Texans or Wiccans, or drug habit, I am attempting to not utterly relinquish a way of being respectful to the humanity of these affected individuals,” he says.

Above all, Bourque-Sheil says he hopes “Dawn Coven” makes the purpose that whereas well being care in America could also be extremely dysfunctional, it doesn’t essentially have to remain that approach.

“I began writing from a spot of anger and frustration and eager to publicly drag the American healthcare system,” he says. “However I believe I ended up in a extra peaceable and resolved place that, by the ability of group, these issues will be addressed. I believe that finally ends up being the optimism of the play.”