>>REVIEW
THIS IS CANCER!
Runs until March 4
Written by Bruce Horak and Rebecca Northan
playRites Festival
Alberta Theatre Projects
Big Secret Theatre (Epcor Centre)
Given an invitation to spend an intimate evening with Cancer, any sensible person would refuse. It’s an introduction that’s often fatal, after all.
In This is Cancer!, the final premiere of Alberta Theatre Projects’s playRites Festival, Rebecca Northan and Bruce Horak have extended that invitation, offering a one-on-one with Cancer himself in an evening of cathartic monologue, music and audience participation. But in trying to strike a balance between therapy and theatre, This is Cancer! falls heavily toward the former, often losing momentum in the search for release.
Appearing after an extended blackout as a desperate figure in sparkling gold spandex with bulbous growths protruding from his distended stomach, knees and other areas, Cancer has the blackened smile of a pathetic loser. An unloved child with a celebrity complex that feeds on the attention of cancer awareness and research movements, his obsession with individual humans are love affairs gone obsessively wrong, a fact he alternatively rationalizes and apologizes for.
The show even provides an interesting mythological backstory for Cancer – the warped offspring of a discovered tryst between Ares and Aphrodite, disfigured by an arrow plunged into the womb. While the character of Cancer is exhaustively realized by Horak’s elastic physicality, the 85-minutes spent in the Big Secret Theatre still feel haphazard and uneven.
At its best, This is Cancer! is a charming showcase for Horak’s sweeping movement and musical skill. As proven by years of appearances with perennial favourite Monster Theatre, Horak has a knack for music as comedy. Accompanied by pianist Waylen Miki and covering "Mister Bojangles" with the swaying stance of Sammy Davis Jr., Horak’s performance seems even more uncanny given that, like the famous Rat Pack member, one of Horak’s eyes is prosthetic – the result of a form of cancer called bilateral retinoblastoma. Away from these moments of cabaret energy, however, the show falters in tepid audience participation and exposition. With Cancer established as a flawed, vain and desperate human figure, the show begs to move on, but instead continues to hawk the same conceit until the repetition becomes exhausting.
In an interview, Horak said that the genesis for This is Cancer! came from the pursuit of clowning therapy for adults, a fact that was certainly evident among a few audience members who were literally moved to tears. The idea of creating an identifiable, mock-able figure for a disease so pervasive and destructive is a good one, but mired in catharsis and insistent on reluctant audience participation, the show requires such a huge investment from the audience that its general appeal is less evident. For most of its running time, This is Cancer! feels more like therapy than entertainment.
Northan and Horak have obviously invested themselves heavily in the show, with Horak supplying tapes of his father (who succumbed to cancer) dictating his eulogy and his mother discussing the impact of Horak’s own cancer survival. But in the production’s post-mortem Q&A session, Northan herself conceded that the work is still in progress, with major revisions to the show being made scant days before its premiere, a fact obvious on opening night.
If Northan and Horak can bridge the show’s therapeutic elements with broader appeal, This is Cancer! can be a genuinely engaging performance that finds comedy in its dark subject matter. At the moment, its uneven execution is overwhelmed by its subject matter, with slow moments swallowing its larger, good intentions. |
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