A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center of New York City

Or: The Woman Behind the Curtain

Ah yes. A tale as old as time. Girl meets boy, boy meets girl, while he’s standing vigil over his dying mother’s bedside, she’s testing out vagina jokes on her equally comatose mother on the otherside of the curtain. Karla (Veronica Von Tobel) an aspiring standup comedian, and Don (Luke Massengill), a sweatpants wearing schlub who doesn’t aspire to anything, come from very different worlds; they never would have met had it not been their respective parents, Marcie (Shelia Hennessey) and Geena (Jennifer Woodward Wolff). Theirs is a relationship bourn of animosity, matures to conolingus in the unisex wheelchair accessible bathroom, and grows into something more.

Playwright Halley Feiffer stacks a precarious tower of cards in her first act, the negative space between sex and cancer, humor and heartbreak becoming more and more tenuous the higher it climbs. The joy of the play comes from Feiffer’s audacity, sparkling outrageous gags and attempting to hide ever burgeoning hurts. As a writer she tends to favor Karla, whose flourishes Von Tobel takes to like a color guard, while smoothly inhabiting the thin skin and raw bundle of nerves and fears that fills up so many comedians. Her mid-coitus monologue caught between gasps and kisses is a work of comedic triumph. Massengill is left with Don’s more formal speech, littered with the false promise of repetitions, yet he does more than enough with the quietly blooming speeches of heartbreak and the winnowing of his soul, as well as the looks of wonder as Don slowly cracks open for the woman on the far side of the curtain.

But the zest of Feiffer’s play lies not in the romance but the relationship of the two lovers with their mothers. Don and Geena’s relationship is rarely glimpsed as she lies in a haze of drugs, but the bond between them is war and tender. Marcie, more lucid, sharp and charming, is another story. Still weak from her operation, Hennessey paints a lively cunning character capable of brief but blinding cruelty. Her half-pipe sweeps from machivellian patient to shaking and scared child leave us breathless, and knits a strong bond with Von Tobel who, for all her characters power, is incapable of touching her mother and shows us a grounded grief and fear in the wooden set of her face and the fragile politeness of her voice. It’s a tale as old as time, parent and child sundered by one tragedy, brought together by another, carefully laying stones in the onrushing torrent of time, trying to reach each other.