Read an Excerpt
A play is a story that happens. It’s here—this moment, this accretion of moments onstage—before it’s gone. I prefer ‘moments’ because rarely do we retain a play’s words, no matter how lyrically or pithily or wittily they’ve been uttered. We revel in, hold on to, and carry with us these moments that moved us—out of ourselves and into the present. Many years ago, though not so many years, I sat in a room and listened to a writer speak. I considered him old; I was not yet thirty. The writer was Barry Hannah, and he was somewhere in his sixties—an age far, far over my horizon. He was meant to deliver a lecture about the craft of writing fiction. As far as I can remember, he spoke mostly of his recent treatment for colon cancer. I can still see him: the casual way he sat sideways in his chair in a toppled column of sunlight, describing for us the morning when he woke to a vision of Jesus at the foot of his hospital bed. I can’t quote any of the lecture. What I remember was how that day, those moments, shook me deeply. Made me feel embarrassed—for what? For him? Me? I was awake. I was scared. I wondered, Is this a craft lecture? Now I know it was. About eighteen months ago, six months after my wife had been diagnosed with stage 2B breast cancer, I was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer with metastasis to the liver. Luckily—I want to say miraculously—the metastasis consisted of two small lesions located in a resectable portion of my liver. I was given a very small chance for survival, smaller for a cure, but they did use the word "cure" (medically speaking one is not considered cured until ten years have passed without recurrence). My liver surgeon remarked offhand that a few years ago I would have had, at most, six months to live. First, they removed seven inches of my descending colon, then somehow stitched me back together without the need for a colostomy bag. They took 10 percent of my bladder for safe measure. Then I received four months of intensive chemotherapy; they "hit me with everything," as my oncologist liked to phrase it, because I was relatively young and could withstand it. Then my liver was resected, only about 15 percent of it, as the chemotherapy had shrunk those two lesions substantially, reducing the smaller tumor to just a smudge of scar tissue. They nipped out my gallbladder—again, just to be safe. Then two more months of chemo. My treatment, as had been promised, was over by Christmas. According to recent scans and blood tests, I currently reside in the ‘no evidence of disease’ category, or NED, a term that has more or less replaced the apparently out-of-vogue "remission," which is fine with me as the latter has always implied a mere respite from the disease anyway. Chris Shinn is a playwright about my age. He is currently NED after not one but two bouts of Ewing’s sarcoma, a cancer usually afflicting children. When I reached out to him after my diagnosis for some sort of solace—advice, maybe—he said, among other things, "Bet on yourself." And why not? We are playwrights after all; we’re accustomed to thinking, Perhaps my next play will be a hit, win a prize, move to Broadway or the West End, or at least move somebody deeply. But I’m realistic too. "No evidence" means simply no evidence now, which is of course all we always have. Physicists, philosophers, and my Hollywood psychic will tell you: only this moment exists. Easy for them to say; we don’t know what ‘now’ is. William James defined it as the "short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible." I read somewhere that the present moment is twenty-five syllables long: a respectable sentence.Dramaturgically speaking, the now is what theatre practitioners refer to as a "beat." A beat is a unit of action. One beat begins when (and where, on the page) the previous beat ends. This juncture is change, and change is what keeps the audience awake. Change crackles, casts light, smolders, fizzles—explodes.
