What makes Chimera so compelling is that Wendy Lill has lived almost all the roles the play dramatizes: NDP critic for both culture and persons with disabilities, she came to politics after a career in community health care and as a reporter for the CBC.
This play arose from her experience as one of the parliamentarians who passed a Canadian law in 2004 concerning human reproductive technologies. She recalls being at a conference where a spokesman for a pharmaceutical company boasted about the array of new pre-diagnostic tests being developed to detect anomalies in fetuses. "I was sitting in this room with many people with disabilities and I realized that what he was saying is that quite possibly a lot of these people would not be around today. They wouldn't have been born."