The first scene of the play opens on Dr. Vivian Bearing, who is standing in the middle of the stage wearing a hospital gown, identification bracelet, and a baseball cap. She holds onto an IV pole as she addresses the audience directly. She talks about the irony of being asked how she feels every day when she’s clearly sick, and she jokingly remarks that she is “sorry” she will miss when someone asks her that “question and [she] is dead” (5).

From there, Vivian quickly sets the scene: she is a professor of seventeenth-century poetry who has been diagnosed with stage-four metastatic ovarian cancer, but her treatment is not working. Although Vivian says she hates to “give away the plot,” she reveals that she has “less than two hours” to live before the scene closes (6-7). 

The scene shifts to an office and Vivian sits down across from Dr. Harvey Kelekian, the chief of medical oncology at the University Hospital. He tells her she has “advanced metastatic ovarian cancer” with little presence, then launches into a clinical—and complicated—explanation of her very aggressive treatment plan. Vivian analyzes the language Kelekian uses as he speaks, both to better understand what he says and to cope.