 Booby Prize: From Page To Stage
by M. Heather Carver
WRITING AND STAGING MY ONE-WOMAN PLAY, “Booby Prize; A Comedy about Breast Cancer,”has been more than a personal healing journey: it has been a way of unmasking the performance of every-day life that a cancer patient experiences. I began writing the play soon after my diagnosis with breast cancer in October, 2005.
While I have been writing and performing for most of my life, I didn’t know what a dramatic turn my work was about to take. After a bi-lateral mastectomy and complications with staff infection that followed, I entered the world of chemotherapy treatment in November. Shortly after my second round of chemo, my hair began to come out in clumps. There was no keeping it for the upcoming winter holidays. Visions of Joan of Arc clouded my mind as I thought about shaving my head. I have always been interested in actresses who have played Joan, and their tales of having to relive the moments when her head was shaven before the trial can be haunting.
I was really upset and began to panic. I went to all the places giving free hats and began a collection. My costume designer friends Kerri and Mary Frances helped me find some wigs from our department’s costume shop. Gathering head coverings gave me a sense of power and control. We called in expert forces and Marsha Miller, an experienced actress who always looks good, came to the dressing room to help. I didn’t know then that I would later be comfortable with baldness. All I knew was that my hair was falling out in clumps – on my pillow, in the shower, in my sink, and in my hats. I took all of the wigs home. It was time to talk about my hair falling out with my daughters Tricia and Ellie, then ages 5 and 2. I let the girls play with the wigs – long blonde, short red “chorus” girl wigs, curly, gray – we tried them on and even took photographs.
It was time. I could not endure my hair’s daily departure and I was going to shave it all off – Joan of Arc paranoia and all. A friend of mine had clippers so she came over and began to shave my head. Another friend and my mother came with a camera and my life partner Bill was in the next room for moral support. And it began – Kim took the clippers and shaved right down the middle of my head. I looked at the curly locks sticking out over my ears. “I look like Bozo!” I shouted, “Bill, get my clown nose!” I took my first clown class when I was fifteen and through the years I have volunteered for charity events and given workshops for my students. There she was in the mirror, my former clown self who had never really left me.
So we took photos of me with my Bozo hair and clown nose. And we laughed. And I felt better. That pause between hair and no hair – that hesitancy space of life performance –was filled with laughter. My inner clown became my outer clown and pulled me through, along with my audience: my caring and supportive audience of friends and family. I faced my new bald self and decided that it wasn’t a sign of illness, but health. After all, I had my hair when the tumor was growing. Now the cancer was going, and the treatment was causing the hair loss. I began to write my play about how life can continue to be humorous in even the most discouraging and traumatic experiences.
All my life I have been reading the work of women who choose to write their lives either through fiction or putting on autobiographical memoir. They have always inspired me – for the way that they kept writing through trying lives – whether they struggled with mental illness like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Wolf or physical problems like Edith Wharton and Alice Walker. As a reader, I marvel at their words and their stories. Like so many others I whisper the cliché “how did they do that?” I never stopped to think “how did they not do that?” Perhaps it was their urge to move forward and fill the blank pages that enabled them to go on. They did not live to write, they wrote to live. The words could lift them up and out of their trapped minds or bodies and escape to seashores and juke joints and worlds that lifted them up to live another day.
Writing my play helps me face challenges that come my way with the same strength, grace, courage, and dignity that has gotten me this far – and I will remain funny. I have always been funny – despite what a lot of men say about women not being funny – shame on them! I have a right to my losses – the loss of my body the way it was – my two breasts that went from perky to saggy with feeding with my two beautiful girls. They were me and they are gone and I miss that part of me. I will also miss my complete freedom for awhile, but I will get that back. I will get new hair and I can build some new breasts, but I will not change who I am. I am a writer and a performer, and I have a story to share. •2007
Written exclusively for “The Soul of the American Actor”
M. HEATHER CARVER is the Co-Director of the University of Missouri-Columbia’s department of Writing for Performance Program. She received the 2004 Chancellor’s Award for MU Women for her work as Artistic Director and co-founder of the Troubling Violence Performance Project, a troupe that performs personal narratives about domestic/relationship violence. Creator and Artistic Director of MU’s Life and Literature Performance Workshop and Series, she is also co-editor of Voices Made Flesh: Performing Women’s Autobiography, co-editor of Healthy Primates and Other Plays from the New Play Development Workshop, and her articles appear in “Text and Performance Quarterly” and the “Journal of American Folklore.” Co-coordinator of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s New Play Development Workshop, she is also Vice-Chair of the Performance and Theatre Division of the Central States Communication Association. Ms. Carver’s adaptation of Lynn Miller’s novel, The Fool’s Journey, premiered at MU in November, 2004 and was selected as a national finalist for the David Mark Cohen Playwriting award. She was co-director with Patricia Downey of “Voices Made Flesh: Performances from the Life and Literature Workshop” and directed the solo show, “Being Frank,” written and performed by MU student Kevin Babbitt in New York City. In October, 2006, her play, “Booby Prize” premiered at: A Comedy at the Ellis Fischel 11th annual oncology conference, and was performed at the University of Missouri-Columbia in January, 2007. |
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