The Pharmacists at CitySpace: Tales from Behind the Counter
We took in Thursday night’s performance of The Pharmacists in Easthampton, where a small audience packed the little Blue Room for what I expected to be a laugh-out-loud comedy. It turned out to be a very accurate depiction of what life is like behind the scenes in a typical Walgreens pharmacy. I didn’t laugh much, but I enjoyed the precision of the writing. It captured the clinical detachment, and the reasons why it excited the three pharmacists to give away a lot of prescriptions on the sly.
In an interesting twist, a little overhead projector showed a date and time, and then as each scene ended, a new date older than the previous one. We were going back in time, retracing our steps, as the four-person play unspooled. The three pharmacists hatch a plan to give people their drugs, as ‘voids,’ which means stealing from The Man. As each short scene of the 50-minute production unfolded, we watched the evolution of this plot, and how each staff member got hired. It was a bit too opaque for me, and it took research for me to understand the underlying plot, the hints were so subtle, and the dialogue not really clear.
But I did like the characters that came out, Gianna, the youngest, insecure and yet very into the cause, and the funny way that Kaminsky gets shy when she comes on to Gianna. She’s the boss…but she wants to be friends and not miss anything socially too, as part of the trio. It’s an interesting twist when we go back all the way to four years ago when Mike was first hired, then we see Kaminsky before she became the top dog.
The simple set worked as a realistic Walgreen’s back room, and the way Gianna (Hannah Cornish) and Mike (Susannah Wilson) talked, with dead-on parodies of what we always hear when we go pick up our prescriptions, was effective. ‘We need to check with your primary,’ and that will be $181 with the co-pay, please sign here, etc. They really made it feel like they were at a suburban Walgreens and we were all back there with them. When Dr. Kaminski (Isa Braun) waits on hold with the insurance company and tilts back in her chair, bored, we can relate; we’ve all been there!
The program had an odd, hard-to-parse quote from Frederic Jameson that did nothing to explain the play or the motivations behind author Jeremy Geragotelis’ script, something about human nature being historical rather than natural. I like the popular notion of helping out people with steep prescription costs, though stealing is not the way to right that wrong.
The show was produced by Green Brain Theatre, a new troupe based in Easthampton, and the director was Ash Goverman. I caught up with her after the show, and she shared these thoughts.
“One of the benefits of the play moving backwards in time is that the audience is left at the end with the simple seed of all revolutionary activity: earnest conversations with our loved ones in which we imagine livable futures. We see the violence of our capitalist systems, and that their maintenance depends on our compliance.
“But we can only use our power to work towards something different if we can imagine it. I hope that the audience leaves with seeds of questions that they can water: what kind of world is worth living in? What would you want to do with your life, if we already had everything we need?”
The Pharmacists, Green Brain Theatre at CitySpace, 43 Main Street, Easthampton, MA. Performance dates: Friday, August 7, 2026 at 5:30 pm (masks required) and Friday, August 7, 2026 at 8:30 pm. Tickets here