Derek Schwabe

Endless life and death scenarios, surging stress-levels, super-charged power dynamics and noble heroes in pristine white coats: we could fill waiting rooms with all the reasons why medicine is one of the most reliable modern storytelling backdrops. Take General Hospital, House, Grey's Anatomy, and more recently, New Amsterdam and The Good Doctor as evidence. It's surprising that a show like Medicine the Musical, written by Michael Ehrenreich and directed by Joey Murray, hasn't already claimed the gaping hospital-shaped space waiting on the Broadway stage (and no, that one musical episode of Scrubs doesn't count). But despite impressive performances from its cast, band, and production team at HERE Arts Center, this rock musical will need some serious re-writing if it hopes to fill it.

This dark new play from Christie Perfetti Williams lingers over a multi-tiered intersection of vulnerable identities, confronting the devastating consequences of a near-future scenario that's all too easy to imagine.

'He was not.' A grieving grandmother repeatedly belts that powerful phrase across the audience from the opening scene of 'Brownsville Song (b-side for tray)'-an emphatic repudiation of the 10 second newsflash that has gutted the soul out of her dead grandson, Tray (Sideeq Heard). Another young, black life cut short on the jagged streets of Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood--same old story that flashes across TV screens and dots the local section of newspapers every day. But he, she insists, was not. Was not what? The phrase is never fully finished, but as 'Brownsville Song' plays on, you find yourself wondering less about what Tray wasn't, and reveling more in what he was.