Theater Review - My Left Breast

It’s almost impossible to watch 7 Stages’ new production of My Left Breast without wondering how the original plays. In 1994, Susan Miller won an Obie Award for her one-woman, self-performed monologue about how her struggle with breast cancer shaped everything in her life from her relationship to her son to her identity as “a bisexual lesbian.”

??
For the 7 Stages production, director Melissa Foulger reconceives the work for a trio of actors. Stacey Melich plays Susan while Yvonne Singh and Brian Crawford assay all the other people in her life, as well as serving as a kind of Greek chorus of her thoughts. Rather than clarify My Left Breast’s ideas and feelings, however, the 7 Stages’ production merely complicates them.

??
One of the challenges with the show is that Susan tells her story and observations in a kind of chronological collage, so you’re never quite sure of the stage of her illness, the age of her son or the state of her love life from scene to scene. Crawford cleverly plays the boy at different ages and Singh captures the different stages of a love affair, but generally My Left Breast seems more difficult than it should be.

??
It doesn’t help that Susan, as the narrator, makes statements of both fascinating insight and fatuous self-absorption. When she alludes to the 1980s as a decade when we all lost our innocence, you can appreciate the tragedy of AIDS while wondering if we were all that “innocent” in the 1970s. When Melich, as Susan, mentions playing charades at an artists’ colony, or discusses herself (even ironically) as “the topic of our times” or “the hot issue,” she sounds almost insufferably upbeat.

??
When My Left Breast gets past the requisite rhetoric of uplift, it reveals some genuinely fascinating details about Miller’s battle with the disease and how it changed both her body and her identity. While chemo patients frequently turn to marijuana to fight the symptoms, her drug of choice was cocaine. Sex became an act of defiance against the illness.

??
As affecting as Melich can be at such moments, you can’t help but believe that My Left Breast would be more powerful and successful with Miller performing it herself. There’s a world of difference between being a cancer survivor and playing one.