On the one hand, there’s plenty of Buddhist philosophy on death and dying that was familiar to me from my undergrad days as a peer-teaching assistant in Maury Stein’s “Sociology of Birth and Death.” (Stein is not the Brandeis sociology professor of “Tuesdays with Morrie” fame, but not altogether dissimilar.) That part I could have done without.

But there is much intriguing in the play. In the first place, there’s Deavere Smith’s trademark perceptiveness about the peculiar ways that people express contradictory explanations of why the world is the way it is. Using only quotes from interviews she has done, she assembles brilliantly insightful stories. For example, she narrates a cowboy’s tale of his own physical traumas and the impending doom that he believes awaits poor people and the working class in this country. She hits the perfect pitch of the quirky individual as the story ends incongruously: “Basically, I’m an optimist.” Her impersonation of such oddly-chosen celebrities as Lance Armstrong and Peter Gomes are both funny and incisive without being mean.

But the story that will stick with me is from a doctor in New Orleans who had always been eager to believe that Charity Hospital could provide the most down-trodden with the very best medical care if individual providers would commit to making it happen. She saw all along that some doctors were themselves part of the problem — she railed against the cruelty of a resident toward a 13-year-old with pelvic inflammatory disease, against the ways that the hospital often became one more place where impoverished black people were under assault. But only after Katrina did she realize that the individual level was not enough. She came to understand her patients’ and nurses’ “heavy sense of resignation” in a new way when days passed rationing food, checking vital signs by flashlights. She gradually came to terms with the fact that she was wrong and her patients and nurses were right that Charity Hospital had been abandoned.

Sometimes I see students who are like that doctor, who want to believe that through their sheer energy — and OK some expertise, too — they can undo the structural oppressions that shape health care in Atlanta and beyond. Those students are inspiring to me. I know that they will help some people, and perhaps be important in changing our city and our health care system for the better. But I don’t know how that deep commitment to the transformative power of the individual will can come to terms with the tremendous inertia of structural irrationality, cruelty, and indifference. Deavere Smith turns to Buddhism in her conclusion. Unsatisfied with that, I’m not sure where else we might go.