Love and Death

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center of New York City at the Lucille Lortel Theatre

(L-R: Beth Behrs, Lisa Emery, Jacqueline Sydney, and Erik Lochtefeld in A Funny Thing.)

There was no play on Broadway this season that celebrated the profundity and the healing power of human connection with a defter or more uplifting hand than Halley Feiffer’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center of New York City (through July 3rd at the Lucille Lortel), which, despite what its name and subject matter might have you believe, it one of the least gimmicky productions I’ve ever seen.  It’s not about cancer at all, really -- it would be more accurate to say that it is a pure reflection of the unique and developing viewpoint of Ms. Feiffer, a playwright we’re all lucky to have.  That viewpoint, by the way, would be that when you place the human condition under the harshest of fluorescent lights, lights with which the hospital room set (all too familiar to anyone with an aging or sick relative) is rife, it tends to be disconcerting and not a little unpleasant.  But fundamentally, Ms. Feiffer seems to tell us with this clearly autobiographical and wrenchingly honest play, the saving graces of this sideways condition called life are art, love, and each other.  And even when we’re unwilling to take advantage of those things, they sometimes slip by nonetheless.

It sneaks up on you, this honest, brilliant, beautiful play.  The scenario -- fellow caretaking adult children Karla (Beth Behrs) and Don (Erik Lochtefeld) meet less-than-cute while visiting their sick mothers (Jacqueline Sydney and Lisa Emery) -- seems forced and unnatural.  Karla, especially, who wears disgustingly cool Supreme hats loose at the top and ironically loud bomber jackets, feels like a stereotype brought to life.  But we come to see quickly that Karla, domineered for years by her cutting matriarch, Marcie (who, when she wakes up and enters the action, sends a valuable jolt into the play thanks to Ms. Emery’s extraordinary vitality as an actress), and still grieving for her long-dead sister, has reached a point where everything in her life has become a defensive pose, and generates almost immediate and genuine friction when she’s brought into contact with the vulnerable Don, for whom nothing is.

There is no more accurate way to describe the performances in this play other than to say that they are gifts -- the kind of shockingly good stuff one sometimes finds off-Broadway and is thrilled to see having been snuck into the world.  Ms. Behrs, especially, takes you totally by surprise.  She is completely sympathetic and real, and she has the benefit of inhabiting a character clearly based on Ms. Feiffer herself (her mother, Jenny Allen, had cancer in the late aughts).  It is a character written with Ms. Feiffer’s characteristic unforgiving but nonetheless beautiful honesty, and one with whom we yearn to spend more time.  It’s a masterful performance by Ms. Behrs (trapped for what seems likely to be forever in the unforgiving shoals of the awful network sitcom 2 Broke Girls), not the least because her character is a stand-up comedian, one of the hardest professions to play believably.  But I never doubted for a second that Karla was a performer, and watching her carefully manufactured exterior drop as her character swerves further into vulnerability is a magnificent thing. (Incidentally, she also plays the large part in of of the most genuine -- and hilarious -- oral sex scenes I've ever seen on stage or screen.)

Mr. Lochtefeld’s Don, a wealthy former tech mogul whose family disasters (a drug-addicted son, a philandering wife, a borderline-comatose mother) have left him emotionally ruined, must, of course, form the other side of the inevitable but no less satisfying sparks-fly moment to which Don and Karla’s relationship eventually builds.  They are like salves to each other, and to the wounded nerves of the audience both from the more jangling parts of the play and of their own lives. His honesty matched with Ms. Behrs’ and Ms. Feiffer’s makes for a play that can only be called veritably optimistic in the best sense of the word.  In fact, one can only conclude from the warmth and joy this seemingly dark comedy seems to exude like lifeblood that Ms. Feiffer may be the last true optimist left in the upper echelons of modern playwrights.  Funny thing, that.