“Cancer Can Kiss Her Ass”
What better setting for a play to hash out issues of life
and death than within the confines of a hospital room, where someone’s life is
in mortal danger? Countless plays have hospital scenes, of course, but some are
entirely set in realistic replications of such forbidding, foreboding places, like
Whose Life Is It Anyway?, Wit, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Gynecologic Unit at Memorial Sloan
Kettering Hospital (yes, that’s a play by Halley Feiffer).
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| Ako, Jay Patterson. Photo: James Leynse. |
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| Emma Kikue, Satomi Blair. Photo: James Leynse. |
Winkler’s heroine, ailing from uterine cancer, is the charmingly
feisty, middle-aged Japanese mom, Masako (Ako), ensconced up center in a Lexington,
Kentucky, hospital bed for most of the hour and 40-minute play, whose action
covers around four days. This perfect mother and loving wife hides her nearly bald
head in a headscarf, and remains strong and optimistic enough—“Cancer can kiss
my ass,” she snaps—to support her worried family. She sometimes utters a
Japanese word, like oishii (delicious),
but there’s little that otherwise marks the situation or conversations from an
ethnic point of view. Meanwhile, Masako endures the anguish (and temporary
relief) brought on by chemo and other treatments: vomiting, incontinence, pain,
inability to eat—the whole nine yards.
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| Tom Coiner, Satomi Blair. Photo: James Leynse. |
Her husband is James (Jay Patterson), a hulking, recovering
alcoholic with a rustic, “y’all”-peppered accent, who also overcame a serious
bout of cirrhosis. He now gets his greatest pleasure from collecting rocks—of which
he speaks with the passion and (implausibly) technical language of a geologist—and
selling them at flea markets.
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| Jay Patterson. Photo: James Leynse. |
Because he was a lousy spouse and father, his survival, in
the face of his perfect wife’s suffering and decline, seems intended as an ironic
comment on God’s will. In the manner of so many current plays, he delivers much
of the play’s exposition in straightforward narrative style, the premise being that
he’s addressing an AA meeting.
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| Satomi Blair, Tom Coiner. Photo: James Leynse. |
James and Masako’s 30ish daughters are Hiro (Satomi Blair),
who’s returned to her mother’s bedside after seven years in New York, where she’s
been building a career while her personal life has been crumbling, and Sophie
(Emma Kikue), a born-again Christian with a propensity for citing Jesus and offering
wordy prayers. Hiro and James are estranged, and Hiro is uncomfortable with
Sophie’s religiosity.
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| Satomi Blair, Emma Kikue, Ako, Jay Patterson. James Leynse. |
The only other character is John, a high school friend of Hiro’s
with whom she’s reconnected via Facebook. A single dad (his late wife was an
addict) with a 13-year-old son, and proud of his MBA, John smokes weed with the
rather desperate Hiro but rebuffs her advances, preferring to keep their relationship
platonic.
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| Emma Kikue. Photo: James Leynse. |
The play avoids clichés about Kentucky rednecks, politics, and educational levels, focusing on the charting of the universality of the family’s
interpersonal conflicts as Masako struggles to survive. Most of it will be familiar
to anyone who’s been through something similar. Composed with heavy doses of
profanity and a sweetly schmaltzy flashback conclusion, God Said This maintains its essentially plotless momentum by exploring
the personal quirks of its characters, inserting cultural references (including
sentimental musical interpolations, like having James sing “Heartbreak Hotel”
or playing “Sometimes When We Touch”), and the piling on of crisis after crisis
(including car and bike accidents) as an excuse for histrionic outbursts.
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| Emma Kikue, Ako, Satomi Blair. Photo: James Leynse. |
While there’s much potential here for a heartwarming comedy
of grown children learning to appreciate their parents and of a family realizing how
much its members need to love and forgive one another, Gould’s direction calls
for so much forced hysteria, anger, and shouting that any honest feelings are smothered
in thespian artificiality. I can’t deny that there was laughter around me but everything
was pushed so hard that I don’t think I cracked a smile more than once or
twice.
This Primary Stages production benefits from a realistic hospital
room setting by Arnulfo Maldonado on which scenes not in the hospital, as in a
car or elsewhere, are presented downstage, without the fuss of any scenic
changes. Ryan Seeling creates suitable lighting that helps isolate scenes
outside the room, Jessica Pabst dresses everyone appropriately, and M.L. Dogg
adds a just-right sound design.
God Said This has
its virtues but too many remain on paper, squashed by less than subtle direction.
Then again, the direction may represent a need to cover writing problems.
Wherever the problem lies, God Said This only
rarely spoke to me.
Cherry Lane Theatre
38 Commerce St., NYC
Through
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