Joe is patriotic, independent, and proud in his flannel shirt and dirt-smudged work boots in Mercy Killers, Michael Milligan’s one-man show.

Working hard at his beloved auto repair shop, he doesn’t need help from anyone. Then his wife, Jane, is diagnosed with breast cancer and they start falling through health care cracks.

Milligan’s play was inspired by the huge numbers of “Americans are driven into bankruptcy by medical debt,” he writes in notes to the play. “Mercy Killers is my attempt to translate those statistics into the actual human experience.”