Cast:
in order of appearance

Bonnie Hilton       Glorie  Whitmore
Angelee Johns     Grace Stiles

Dramaturg’s Corner
Graceful and Glorious
By Liz Egan

A variation on the odd-couple formula play, Grace and Glorie contrives a bond between two women whose convergence in real life would be improbable. Gloria Whitman is a Tony Harvard MBA and former power management consultant from Manhattan, now transplanted to Virginia where her husband has joined a power law firm. Grace Stiles is a dying, ornery, illiterate 90-year-old “backwoods redneck” in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia – “all alone in the middle of nowhere.”
The device used to bring these two women together is Hospice; the worldwide organization of professionals and volunteers committed to improving end-of-life care. Gloria is the Hospice volunteer assigned to Grace’s case to help her manage her pain and deal with death. No surprise, Grace needs no such help. She has, in fact, checked herself out of the hospital, refused all pain medication and returned to her small rural cottage because she “wants to be awake to meet death.”
Guess which one of these women really needs help?
But there is more going on here than simple role reversal. Yes, the playwright carefully delineates how Grace faces death as part of life’s expectancy. And he explores Gloria’s sense of guilt in an auto accident. Ironically, it is only after Gloria resigns from Hospice and comes back to Grace’s primitive cabin to “start fresh-see if we could begin again,” that she is able to provide the compassionate support that is at the heart of all Hospice care.
What is Hospice? Hospice is a special concept of care designed to provide comfort and support to patients and their families when a life-limiting illness no longer responds to care-oriented treatments. Hospice neither prolongs life nor hastens death. Its goal is to improve the quality of a patient’s last days by providing palliative care and emotional support to the patient and loved ones, not to help the patient pull through, but to get through, a fatal illness.
At Grace’s urging, Gloria reluctantly reads aloud from a Hospice pamphlet titled The Signs and Symbols of Approaching Death. No sugar coated pill here. Just the parts in simple declarative sentences.“ The patient may become increasingly confused about time, place and identity of close and familiar people. The patient’s vision may begin to fail. As will the hearing. The patient will spend more time sleeping and will be difficult to arouse.”
The two women gaze at one another, for the moment silent, but each now fully aware of the role to be played in this final life affirming drama.
Hospice, then, is not a place but a concept. Today there are some 3,000 Hospice programs in the United States providing end-of-life care for more than 600,000 people each year. The largest of these nonprofit membership organizations, The National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, is headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia.

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