By Victor Alvis
Johnny Payne of Eton has been witness to the wonderful results of a heart transplant. He’s also seen the bittersweet introduction of a mother, mourning the death of her 17-year-old son, to the man (not Payne) who had received her son’s heart.
“Can I do one thing?” the woman asked the man. “Could I put my head on your chest to hear my son’s heart beat?”
Payne has never met the family of the 33-year-old woman who died 17 years ago and whose heart he now has. But the 57-year-old well knows how it felt as a 40-year-old — over 6,300 days ago — when he received the precious gift, after waiting nine months for a heart that matched his needs.
Payne was one of three special guests invited to attend Dalton Little Theatre’s Thursday night production of “The God Committee,” a play by New York playwright Mark St. Germain, that examines the moral, ethical and medical decisions a hospital’s transplant committee must make when three patients need the same heart. Who will live, and who will die?
Payne was joined by Jack Waskey, professor of philosophy at Dalton State College, and the Rev. John Rossing, pastor of Christ the King Lutheran Church, in a roundtable discussion following the play. The discussion was moderated by Susan Ridley, who plays Dr. Ann Ross, and Karen Keith, the play’s director. Keith said the dilemmas in such situations arise only because the need for organs so far outweighs their availability.
“People aren’t thinking about what they can leave behind beyond their wills,” Keith said. “The gist of life is tremendously important and doesn’t cost a thing.”
Waskey said people faced with such important decisions must ask themselves what they can do — and what they ought to do.
“There are so many emotions, it’s hard to cut through them all. There are issues of money and morality, and the search for something quantifiable and tangible. But there are also these distractions,” Waskey said. “I think the playwright did a good job mucking through the human reality of the situation.”
Rossing said most religions speak in support of using organ transplants.
“But in a lot of cases of medical ethics, our technological capabilities move faster than our moral ability to keep up with them,” Rossing said. “Most of the moral or ethical questions in the Christian tradition come from our abundance. How do we share with those who have less? But in transplantation, where there is not this abundance, what should be do? We can’t divide a heart by five.”
In the play Dr. Jack Klee (Michael Anthony), the chief medical honcho, is suffering from an unnamed but serious illness; Dr. Alex Gorman (Tracy Starks), who will be doing the transplant, displays the impatient and God-like manner typical of many surgeons; Dr. Kierra Banks (Heather Tom), the youngest and newest committee member, still has to learn to cope with the emotional dynamite of organ transplanting; Dr. Ann Ross (Ridley), a psychiatrist, feels she ought to leave the committee since she is still trying to deal with the recent loss of her teen-aged daughter; Dominick Piero (Paul Vaughn), a wheelchair-bound social worker, hides his loneliness behind the one-liners he tosses out at every opportunity; Father Charles Dunbar (William Visher), a member of the hospital board, has information that changes everything; the most sympathetic character, Nurse Nella Larkin (Ernesteen Joyner), is something of a centering presence who has been on the committee since the beginning.
The play, produced by Helen Crawford, continues today at 8 p.m. and at Sunday’s 2 p.m. matinee.
