"Alison is a gifted writer and performer... painfully funny and profound."- Ann Randolph
"A surgical strike to the funny bone. Penetrating, probing, and as revelatory as an MRI." - Jane Veit, RN
"...masterful parody, amazing humor, and unusual sensitivity and compassion. She humanizes a world that is often percieved as sterile and impersonal. Her work will be a revelation to many and a thoroughly entertaining experience for all." - Jeff Anderson, M.D.
"...funny, heartbreaking, frustrating, frightening and plain ol' interesting...a must-see."- Mike Oz, Fresno Bee Vital Signs is a frank and funny vivisection of life on-the-job in a modern hospital in wildly diverse San Francisco. Equally comic, tragic and touching, it reveals what really goes on behind-the-scenes in a bustling medical center where patients, nurses, and families try their best to make the most of some very difficult, and at times utterly ridiculous, situations. Playing nearly two dozen characters, Alison is hoping to raise your blood pressure, have you in stitches, and give you a probing, insider’s x-ray view of the hospital setting and the people who valiantly cope with it. Directed by David Ford, Alison Whittaker has worked with Ann Randolph. She has performed VITAL SIGNS at the 2012 Rogue Festival in Fresno, the 2011 San Francisco Fringe Festival, the 2011 Boulder International Fringe Festival, the Marsh (Marsh Rising series), San Francisco Theatre Festival, StageWerx, 2011 Women On The Way Festival, and Shotwell Studios.
Vital Signs is based on true experiences that have been broadly fictionalized. All persons and institutions appearing in Vital Signs are fictitious and/or composited. Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
