✭✭✭✩✩

by Maja Ardal, directed by Kim Blackwell

Nightwood Theatre, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto

January 15-February 1, 2015

Naomi: “It’s surprising what one gets used to as ‘normal’”

HER2, the latest play by Maja Ardal, is the second play I’ve seen in three days to deal with people awaiting medical results.  HER2, in fact, had its world premiere the evening after the world premiere of Waiting Room by Diane Flacks.  Both compare the struggles of doctors with those of patients, but Waiting Room errs in giving equal time to both, while concocting a fantasy scenario about the doctors.  In HER2, Ardal’s focus is firmly on the seven volunteers in a new anti-cancer drug trial awaiting the results of the experiment.  HER2 is the stronger play, but the prime difficulty here is the diffuseness of the narrative even though Ardal also runs into problems in plausibly depicting of medical procedures.       

At first you might think that HER2 is some trendy way of spelling “hers” so that it also alludes to breasts.  That may in part be true, but in fact the seven women who are Ardal’s focus have already had single or double mastectomies.  The title really refers to a type of breast cancer known as HER2-positive which makes up about 20-25% of breast cancers.  These cancers are aggressive and fast-growing and are so called because they test positive for a protein called human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (or HER2) that promotes the growth of cancer cells. 

The frame for Ardal’s play is a lecture presented by Kate (Bahareh Yaraghi), who has studied with a world-famous cancer researcher Dr. Danielle Pearce (Nancy Palk).  Kate’s lecture fades into the story of the enthusiastic Kate’s first meeting with the no-nonsense Pearce and to Pearce’s establishing the first human trial for a drug not unlike trastuzumab developed in the 1990s that is specifically designed to attack a weakness in the HER2 positive cells.  For the trial Pearce has deliberately recruited women who have all had breast cancer treatment and surgery but whose cancer has returned, metastasized and been deemed inoperable.

Unusual for a drug trial, Pearce has decided to have the women undergo their therapy as a group rather than in isolation.  This allows Ardal to generate drama that would otherwise be impossible by having the seven women of a wide diversity of ages and races interact with each other. 

Ardal also has a point to prove based on her own experience.  As she notes, “During my cancer treatments I found that the chemotherapy rooms were full of isolated individuals. I wondered, what would happen if a group of women spent their treatment time together? I read about clinical trials with cancer patients in one room receiving the drug. This captured my imagination. The theme became clear. Can community well-being encourage immunity? Is scientific research willing to accept the idea?”

In the course of the action, Ardal shows a rift develop between Kate and Pearce.  Pearce is solely interested in chemical reactions and scientifically provable facts.  Kate, on the other hand, believes that the mere fact that the women are undergoing therapy together is helping to increase their well-being.  Pearce dismisses such unmeasurable “touchy-feely” stuff, but Kate decides to make the relation between community and immunity the topic of her thesis. 

This is all very well until the very end of the play when Ardal returns to Kate’s lecture.  There Kate concludes that in her study (which also seems to be Pearce’s study) the woman who had the greatest feeling of community was the most cancer-free.  This is meant to end the play on a positive note but that note raises far too many questions.  How was Kate able to quantify such unquantifiable notions as “greatest feeling of community” or “most cancer-free”.  For instance, one wonders, most cancer-free in relation to what?  To the others, to her previous state? 

What really ruins this smily-face conclusion, however, is that it contradicts what we have just witnessed.  The one woman whose participation in the drug trial is discontinued, and thus effectively sentenced to death, is one of those who felt a great sense of community with the other women, unlike two others who were notably standoffish. 

While social relationships are known to benefit overall health, Ardal’s overstating the case at the end undermines what she has achieved up to that point.  The seven women are chosen for the trial are a wonderful reflection of the multiplicity of ages, races and world views that make up contemporary Toronto.  There is Frances (Kyra Harper), a farmer who has found solace in religion; Naomi (Chick Reid), a witty but unsociable professor of anthropology who is devoutly atheist; Gloria (Maria Vacratsis), an earthy Wal-Mart employee whose main hope is to be a grandmother before she dies; Daphne (Diane D’Aquila), a simple housewife who depends on her husband Ted for her sense of worth; Minnie (Brenda Kamino), a wise herbalist of Korean background who has faith in natural remedies; Charlene (Monica Dottor), an attractive actress whose life revolves around her daughter; and Anya (Olunike Adeliyi), an antisocial black 19-year-old who does not much like being grouped with these talkative older women.  The nurse who attend them is Gabby (Ellora Patnaik), a compassionate but businesslike lesbian of a subcontinental background. 

The most successful parts of HER2 are the various monologues Ardal gives the women to tell their backstory and express their hopes and anxieties.  Also effective are the various sections where the women speak as a kind of individualized chorus.   Curiously, what seems least natural are the conversations that Ardal presents among the patients as they wait during the prolonged intravenous infusions of the drug.  The reason is that the conversations always take the form of two women talking while the other five listen.  Anyone who has been to a dinner party of four or more will know that the natural tendency is for two or more conversations to spring up simultaneously.  Writing simultaneous conversations among a group on stage is enormously difficult, but some have mastered it.  Chekhov’s plays provide the most obvious examples but so do the

dinner scenes in Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! (1933), Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (1982), Lilian Groag’s The Magic Fire (1997) or most recently Deirdre Kinahan’s Moment (2009).  In comparison with these Ardal’s dialogue seems forced and clunky.

Ardal tries to reinforce the communality of the women’s experiences, both doctors and patients, with a movement interlude choreographed by Monica Dottor.  While often lovely to watch as dance per se, these episodes are largely ineffective mostly because it is difficult to know what, other than the general sense of community, they refer to.  They seem artificially to prolong rather than clarify the drama.  The one time the choreographed movement works is when Dottor shows each of the women reacting in sequence to the first infusion of the drug.  There, for a change, the movement is clearly tied to a specific event. 

Ardal does not venture into the realm of fantasy as Diane Flacks does in Waiting Room as concerns medical protocol, but there are still errors.  At the end of Dr. Pearce’s first drug trial, Pearce pronounced some of the women cancer-free or at least in remission.  That may be dramatically effective, but in reality a doctor could not make such a judgement until the women had had follow-up examinations to determine how long, if at all, their remissions lasted.  It is also totally implausible that Gabby, who is administering the trial, would allow Brenda to brew her own herbal teas for the other women.  Herbal teas, no matter how innocuous Brenda may think them, could easily ruin the results of a clinical trial.  Brenda does not know the nature of the drug they are taking.  Therefore, how can she know how her herbs could affect the drug?  After all, aspirin is found in something as simple as willow bark and L-DOPA in fava beans.     

The worst error is when Ardal has Gabby hand out envelopes to all the women that contain the results of their cancer tests.  Again, it is dramatic to see how they each respond and to try to spot the unlucky one among them, but, luckily, such a cruel way of informing patients of their results does not happen this way because it flagrantly violates patient confidentiality. 

The chief joy of HER2 is to see the marvellous and diverse array of female talent all gathered on stage at the same time.  Under Kim Blackwell’s astute direction, there is no weak performance in the cast and this itself is a powerful testament to the reserves of female acting talent Canada has produced but all to rarely makes full use of.  With luck, a play like HER2 will inspire others to write large-cast plays that explore the similarities and difference in women’s lives now and in the past.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: Olunike Adeliyi, Brenda Kamino, Chick Reid, Monica Dottor, Maria Vacratsis, Diane D’Aquila and Kyra Harper; Chick Reid and Maria Vacratstis. ©2015 Paul Lampert.

For tickets, visit www.nightwoodtheatre.net.