“shit happens a lot and it’s terrible and I’m sorry”

Local playwright and blog/columnist Emily Kaye Lazzaro wrote about a recent encounter with an overheard conversation that took her on a journey similar to the Singer’s in We’re Gonna Die. I loved her blog post about how the encounter unfolded, and it feels so of a piece with the work we’re doing in rehearsal. (I highly recommend reading her whole post, which I’ll excerpt below.)

Emily has publicly written several times about her three miscarriages, and her path towards welcoming her son into her family. In her piece “An Open Letter to the Couple Sitting Next to Me at the Ramen Place at 2:45pm on a Thursday” she recounts that while dining solo the other day, she overheard a couple at the next table trying to come to terms with the miscarriage they had clearly just suffered. It threw her back immediately into her own period of suffering:

I heard a few more things that started to confirm my suspicions. Then I heard the woman say, “I do still want to go away with you, though, before we can try again,” and I burst into tears. The tears were the kind that just flow out of your eyes like somebody turned a faucet on, with no accompanying sobs. I was very surprised by the crying! Just like, oop, we are crying now! I think I played off the nose blowing and face wiping by attributing it to the spicy ramen. […]

I guess I cried because I remembered having that conversation. A very sad thing about having a miscarriage is that it’s sort of like finding out you are going to Disney World, buying a plane ticket, reserving a hotel room, and packing your bag, only to discover that Disney World doesn’t exist, never existed. And you have to cancel your plane ticket. And you feel stupid for ever thinking that Disney World did exist.

She continues…

I’m sure you guys will be okay and everything and I’m glad I didn’t talk to you because I was very clearly making your experience about myself. But whatever. Now I’m obviously making it about myself by writing about it on the Internet. My point here is that this shit happens a lot and it’s terrible and I’m sorry. I’m sorry that it happened to you and that it happens to a lot of people all the time. I’m sorry Disney World doesn’t exist right now. But it might exist later, if you try again.

The Disney World metaphor has broken down.

I’m not even sure there’s anything to be learned from having a miscarriage or two or three. I want there to be something to be learned. But it’s probably just like any kind of loss. The thing to be learned is that it happens once and then it continues to happen for the rest of your godforsaken time on this planet and there’s nothing to be done. There is so much loss and so much suffering. But there is also spicy miso ramen.

 

The exceptionally quotidien nature of suffering — and the feeling that we must be special and so we do not deserve this pain — runs through both Emily’s post and We’re Gonna Die. Horrible things happen all the time.

Medical Ethics, Part 1

Now that we’ve had the chance to explore We’re Gonna Die in detail via tablework, we’re going to start using this blog space to address a few big picture themes and questions. First up: medical ethics. We’ll be engaging this topic in several parts.

The Singer in We’re Gonna Die tells a story of how her father enrolled in a medical trial for a new cancer treatment, the hope this enrollment sparked, and the devastation of not receiving the treatment in time.

There’s much to be explored in the realm of medical trials, but the purview of the Singer’s experience is limited to that of a family member, trying to care for a loved one in pain, and working to understand what seems to be an utterly perverse turn of events: a drug that can help that is being withheld because the parameters of the trial must be upheld.

The question she and her family ask: how is it possible that the prospect of saving a life is less important than the rules of the trial?

The question the prompts for us: How do medical codes of ethics guide doctors and participants in these cases?

The journal Current Oncology sought to address this question, especially when it comes to the “informed consent” of trial participants.

Informed consent is arguably the most important ethical dimension of research on human subjects, and yet it is arguably the most difficult to truly achieve ^10,11. Fully informed consent has three fundamental components ¹²:

• Adequate disclosure of information
• Full patient capacity to comprehend the information
• Voluntariness or freedom of the patient to make a decision

For a [randomized clinical trial] to be justified, a state of clinical uncertainty about the relative merits of a trial’s arms—that is, the groups or methods being compared—must exist. This requirement alone is a difficult concept for most patients to grasp, and it is a sufficiently nuanced and sophisticated concept that even researchers exhibit inconsistency in grasping this very fundamental premise behind clinical research. A priori, a patient is entirely unable to know in advance whether participation in a study might be of personal benefit. The clinical investigator must be completely honest about presenting the experimental nature of the treatment being offered and must avoid propagating the widespread therapeutic misconception in which the patient believes that an offer of an opportunity to access a beneficial therapy is being extended.

Furthermore, clinical investigators cannot possibly predict every foreseeable complication of an experimental therapy, because previously unknown and unencountered complications can arise in the course of clinical research.

This next point seems incredibly important (boldface emphasis mine):

Full capacity is arguably impaired in most patients being confronted with the daunting task of trying to digest all the information concerning a complex trial and making a decision that may have an impact on their quality of life or very survival. Voluntariness may also be adversely affected by a myriad of forces. In the final analysis, the most important component in clinical decision-making and the consent process for many patients may simply be their trust in the clinical investigator.

Is the problem of impaired consent present for the Singer’s father? We can’t know for sure, but I’m interested in how consent connected to the idea of hope — perhaps, even, false hope.

Is false hope a necessary byproduct of participation in such a trial? And, like the other types of suffering explored in We’re Gonna Die, is this an inevitability of life itself?

More on Medical Ethics in part 2, coming soon.

Destroying the Audience

The mission of Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company — which originally created and produced WE’RE GONNA DIE — is “to produce the work of Young Jean Lee,” and the mission of the work of Young Jean Lee is to destroy the audience.

Young Jean Lee in WE’RE GONNA DIE

Described as “the most adventurous downtown [New York] playwright,” Lee roots her playwriting process in fear, starting with the story she thinks she is least allowed to tell or the one that scares her the most. She says:

“When starting a play, I ask myself, ‘What’s the last show in the world I would ever want to make?’ Then I force myself to make it. I do this because going out of my comfort zone compels me to challenge my assumptions and find value in unexpected places. Our goal is to find ways to get past our audience’s defenses against uncomfortable subjects and open people up to confronting difficult questions by keeping them disoriented and laughing. My work is about struggling to achieve something in the face of failure, incompetence and not-knowing. The discomfort and discovery involved in watching this struggle reflects the truth of my experience.”

Because of this fluid aesthetic, a Young Jean Lee play looks different once piece to the next. She’s tackled the Korean-American experience in SONGS OF THE DRAGONS FLYING TO HEAVEN (Lee herself is Korean-American); she’s written King Lear totally out of King Lear in LEAR; explored black identity politics in THE SHIPMENT by merging vignettes that are uncomfortably close to a minstrel show into an absurd drawing room comedy; turned the trappings of female submissiveness into empowerment by stripping performers of clothes (and dialogue) via dance in an UNTITLED FEMINIST SHOW; and went inside the pysches of straight white men in a play appropriately titled STRAIGHT WHITE MEN.

Lee created WE’RE GONNA DIE, a theatrical memento mori wrapped in self-conscious cabaret and pop music, to overturn the universal human desire to be special. Her goal was to create a piece that any ordinary person could perform, and to back up her point, Lee herself took the stage in the original production. The idea of WGD is not to affirm the talent and special performance abilities of a singular star but to create a connection among the audience by creating space for honesty and vulnerability. The stories in WGD could happen to anyone. Assuming we’re special protects us from tragedy — or so we think. Lee turns this assumption on its head.

Not being special is both a comfort and, in the world of WGD, a death sentence. Yet everybody dies, and this fact connects us to every other human being on the planet. So we truly aren’t alone.

LEAR

STRAIGHT WHITE MEN

UNTITLED FEMINIST SHOW

THE SHIPMENT

WGD

THE SHIPMENT