Theatre of social justice


E636 CMAJ  |  JUNE 8, 2020  |  VOLUME 192  |  ISSUE 23 © 2020 Joule Inc. or its licensors

A s I arrive to interview physician–playwright Jeff Nisker, a woman asks him to please lock up when 
he leaves; he’s the only one left in the 
office. His obstetrics–gynecology col­
leagues at London Health Sciences Cen­
tre, in Ontario, moved to another building 
months ago, but Nisker, whose plays and 
musicals have been performed at univer­
sities and professional meetings across 
Canada and in other countries, remains in 
a cramped office at the end of a deserted 
corridor. He retired from clinical practice 
a few years ago, and his teaching duties at 
Western’s Schulich School of Medicine & 
Dentistry are on hold while he recovers 
from prostate cancer, but he’s here in a 
chair that supports his bad back, writing 
longhand about how the Cambie Clinic 
c a s e ,  t h e n  b e i n g  h e a r d  b e f o r e  t h e 
Supreme Court of British Columbia, will 
h a r m  p o o r  a n d  d i s a b l e d  w o m e n  b y 
expanding private health care. “It’s all 
social justice work,” he says, sweeping his 
hand to the pad on his clipboard, the 
printed pages stacked next to his chair, 
and articles he’s published in academic 
journals on a desk nearby. 

Nisker joined the faculty at Western in 
the early 1980s as a clinician–scientist, 
not a writer. But he’s always been a vora­
cious reader, and he credits a scornful 
teacher in grade nine with giving him a 
view of fiction as a way to understand the 
world. On English exams, she told him, 
“You quote huge chunks of things, but 
you have no idea what any of it means.” 
Then she tasked him with discussing spe­
cific novels with her. To Kill a Mockingbird 
was an early assignment, and Atticus 
Finch became his hero. He decided to be a 
human rights lawyer, but his family 
argued that he had to take up the mantle 
for relatives murdered in the Holocaust 
who were physicians, so he went to med­
ical school instead. He attended the Uni­
versity of Toronto, moved to London, 

O n t a r i o ,  f o r  r e s i d e n c y ,  t h e n  s t a r t e d 
researching women’s cancers in San Fran­
cisco before returning to Western.

He’d lost his mother and grandmother 
to breast cancer, so when the BRCA test 
became available to identify women at 
high risk for breast and ovarian cancer, he 
was appalled that Ontario and other prov­
inces didn’t offer it. He started writing and 
speaking on ethics in women’s health and 
wasn’t surprised when the dean asked 
him to take over bioethics teaching for 
the medical school. Certain that narrative 
was key to an ethics curriculum, he 
underpinned his classes with stories and 
movies and added an evening elective 
called “Monday night narratives,” in 
which students could read or perform 
plays. He also wrote scripts and helped 
students write their own. Soon, half the 

class was attending the elective, and even 
those who couldn’t make it knew to con­
tact Nisker if they wanted to work on 
shows (“promotions, props, costumes, 
sets, acting, singing, drawing, writing or 
directing” were on one list alongside his 
phone number). On a typical Monday 
night in 1995, students performed scenes 
from Lisa Loomer’s The Waiting Room, 
with one taking the part of an 18th­century 
Chinese woman whose bound feet were 
necrotic, and another playing a contem­
porary woman whose breast augmenta­
tion may have led to breast cancer. After­
ward, Nisker and a scholar from the 
nearby Westminster Institute for Ethics 
and Human Values discussed society’s 
expectations of physicians.1

As word of his interest in bioethics and 
theatre spread, he fielded unusual requests. 

HUMANITIES  |  PROFILE

Theatre of social justice
n Cite as: CMAJ 2020 June 8;192:E636­7. doi: 10.1503/cmaj.191438

Playwright Dr. Jeff Nisker brings his passion for social justice to the stage.

Sa
nd

ra
 D

uft
on

, L
on

do
n 

H
ea

lt
h 

Sc
ie

nc
es

 C
en

tr
e 

m
ed

ic
al

 p
ho

to
gr

ap
he

r



H
U

M
A

N
ITIES

 CMAJ  |  JUNE 8, 2020  |  VOLUME 192  |  ISSUE 23 E637

In the mid­1990s, some doctors in emer­
gency departments stigmatized patients 
they suspected of having AIDS by donning 
several pairs of gloves. When an AIDS 
advocate contacted Nisker about it, he 
said he could dramatize the problem if he 
met people with AIDS and heard about 
their experiences. “How else am I going to 
write the play?” he asked later. AIDS 
advocates in Vancouver arranged inter­
views in their community, and in 1997, 
AIDS Vancouver presented Nisker’s play, 
with a cast of medical students and resi­
dents. He disdains that script today, call­
ing its prose “purple,” but it was his first 
show for an audience beyond his stu­
dents, and the success fuelled him.

The following year, Orchids, his musical 
about embryo selection and eugenics, 
premiered at Western’s theatre at Talbot 
College. Nisker had been studying pre­
implantation genetic diagnosis in the 
early 1990s, but he’d shut down his 
research after people called to volunteer 
for it, hoping it would help them preselect 
for male children. “You’ve got to take 
these stands,” he said. Now, he’d returned 
to the subject of genetic diagnosis, inter­
viewing a physician with Tourette syn­
drome, the heritable tic disorder, and 
writing a script about two women meeting 
at an infertility clinic, one who is living a 
full life with Tourette and one who wants 
to avoid having a child with Tourette.

“It takes some delicious chutzpah to 
want to create a musical about Tourette 
and IVF [in vitro fertilization],” said Strat­
f o r d ,  O n t a r i o – b a s e d  p e r f o r m e r  L i z a 
Balkan, who directed the touring version. 
And Nisker went further: he convinced the 
Canadian Institutes of Health Research 
and Health Canada to underwrite the 
tour, arguing that it would stimulate valu­
a b l e  d i s c u s s i o n  a s  t h e  g o v e r n m e n t 
develop ed regulations for genetic diagno­
sis. “Orchids touched people deeply,” Bal­
kan said. “They would come up after­
wards crying, or stick around to talk 
about their own personal experiences.” 
E v e r  t h e  a c a d e m i c ,  N i s k e r  a n d  h i s 

research team taped and analyzed the 
after­performance discussions, conclud­
ing that theatre is an essential tool for 
engaging the public in health policy.2

He applied this truth to another drama 
that was challenging his abilities. In the 
1990s, he met a woman with quadriplegia 
d u e  t o  m u l t i p l e  s c l e r o s i s .  S m o k i n g , 
swearing and racing around the hospital 
in an electric wheelchair she operated 
with her chin, she urged Nisker to write 
about her, and he interviewed her several 
times. As they got to know one another, 
she added him to her list of emergency 
contacts; he introduced her to his sons 
and his Monday night students. In Calce-
donies, the play he later wrote about her 
with Balkan as dramaturge, “Friend,” the 
man in Nisker’s role, discovers “Ruth” 
wants to write poetry, but she’s been 
waiting years for her chair’s joystick to be 
hooked up to her computer. Indignant, 
“Friend” calls the regional biomedical 
engineering unit and, in a moving passage 
of the play, an engineer calls back.3

[Speaks very rapidly] 

I quickly plead Ruth’s story, insisting that I’m 
not asking him to see Ruth ahead of someone 
else, rather to see her after hours, and would be 
happy to pay him at an overtime rate, and 
would consider it a personal favour.

[Sheepishly]

He jumps in before I embarrass myself further 
with, “Don’t you think that every parent with 
financial means, whose child has cerebral palsy 
or a neuromuscular condition, offers to pay me 
to see their child after hours? They all want their 
child in computerized education, rather than 
falling farther and farther behind kids their age. 
Some parents without the money offer to “beg 
borrow or steal” to pay me. I stopped returning 
calls 2 years ago. The only reason I’m returning 
yours is because you’re a physician.

An engineer eventually sees Ruth to take 
measurements, telling her to be patient 
until the computer linkage can be com­
pleted, but she dies from an infection 
before that happens.

Nisker and Balkan recruited Sheila 
Boyd, an actor disabled from birth by 
spina bifida, to take the part. Dancing and 
doing the moonwalk with an electric 
wheelchair donated for use in the show, 
Boyd left people in tears with her per­
formance at the 2014 meeting of the 
Canadian Bioethics Society in Vancouver. 
In Montréal, McGill University students 
saw a portion of the play, then heard local 
experts discuss the legal and physical 
challenges of disability. Boyd would like 
to do the show in other cities, though 
Nisker isn’t pushing for that. “I’m not a 
producer,” he tells me. “I’m not a theatre 
person.” He points out that he’s primarily 
a scientist, with more than 200 published 
papers. Still, he’d like a broader audience 
for the “Ruth” story, so he turned the 
script into the novella Patiently Waiting 
For…,4 which he self­published and sells 
online and at medical conferences.

The book now on Nisker’s clipboard 
includes tales of other women with 
difficult and desperate encounters with 
the health care system. It’s a sunny fall 
day and he could be out paddling the 
Thames River in the kayak tied to the roof 
of his SUV in the hospital parking lot, but 
he’s eager to complete it and file it as a 
f a c t u m  w i t h  t h e  S u p r e m e  C o u r t  o f 
Canada — as the court hears the Cambie 
Clinic case. As he put it, “If the Supreme 
Court justices want to read Patiently 
Waiting For … , they will get an idea.”

Miriam Shuchman MD 
Toronto, Ont.

References
1. Lin C. Yellow brick road bioethics. UWOMJ 

1995;65:23.
2. Cox SM, Kazubowski­Houston M, Nisker J. Genet­

ics on stage: public involvement in health policy 
development on pre­implantation genetic diag­
nosis. Soc Sci Med 2009;68:1472­80. 

3. Nisker J. From Calcedonies to Orchids, plays pro-
moting humanity in health policy. Toronto: 
Iguana Books; 2012:72­3. 

4. Nisker J. Patiently waiting for ... Toronto: Iguana 
Books; 2016. 

This article has been peer reviewed.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=19233530&dopt=Abstract