"Throwing Bones" by Sojourn Theatre on April 3rd in Portland, OR

"Throwing Bones" is a remarkably humane story about three ill women and the personal and medical care they recieve. One is a black South African whose cheating partner passes on the HIV virus to her, another is a white South African whose illness is undiagnosable by Western doctors, and the third is a young woman in Portland with cystic fibrosis whose mother who is devastated upon learning of it. Each story illuminates another in a symbiotic way that I've rarely seen in theater. From the moment of learning about her daughter's cystic fibrosis, the mother thinks constantly about it. In a way, she begins to experience her daughter's death at that moment of learning about the diagnosis. (There is a wonderfully moving scene -- maybe to say it is a vignette is more accurate --when she finds out about this illness at the dinner table. The news is whispered to her and not a word is spoken. We witness her devastation through the way she handles the dishes. Ther's another stand out scene where, in the daughter's hospital bed, the two play a game of re-enacting a movie deathbed scene. We see them try to control what is inevitable by playing it out with humor. The mother, of course, becomes the grieved person she's mimicking and breaks down sobbing while the daughter laughs uncotrollably.) She never lives another day, when her daughter is both alive and after her death, that she doesn't miss her daughter. Death comes early, even before the daughter dies. In contrast, the black South African has decided not to tell her mother of her illness. She explains that once she does die, her mother will suffer unmentionable pain. She knows that, like the other mother, her mother will begin to experience her death upon learning the news. The play is filled with unspoken comparisons like this. Another I'll mention just briefly is between the two doctors - one an ivy league educated physician and the other a South African faith healer. We get glimpses into why both do the work they do and their relationship to each other as healers (or rather, as someone who tries to stave off the inevitable).

The structure of the play, in the way that it tells these stories, is impressive enough. However, there are dance sequences and moments in which the characters speak directly to the audience. The movement is choreographed by a member of Urban Bush Women. Rather than being silly or cheesy, it is moving, conveying sadness, joy, pain, and even ideas. At one stand out moment in the piece, the American doctor instructs the audience on how to feel for the pulse of the person to the left. He carefully walked us through that and after a few seconds I slowly began to feel the pulse of the person to my left, feeling it get stronger and stronger. We continued to feel the pulse for a while and, with our finger on that wrist, he tells us that that pulse will enevitably stop beat and that person will surely die. Then, he continues, there are people across the world (causing us to envision South Africa) whose pulses are ceasing to beat. In doing this, he creates an immediate and intimate moment with our neighbor (many of whom were strangers to the person next to us) and extends that intimacy to someone we've never laid eyes on but summon as a result of this very bodily experience. Interestingly, we pay more attention to the pulse we're feeling and imagine that person's death. However, the person to our right is feeling our pulse and our death is also being alluded to. In keeping with the concentration of the play, though, it is the otehr person's death we consider.

Two things strike me about this company: their ambition and their care. This is one of those plays where so many decisions could have gone bad and seemed cheesy but none do because every artistic decision has been carefully considered and shaped. The ambition is to humanely examine our experience of illness and death and the way we create meaning out of them. Creating a play about death and dying is, of course, huge. Yet they do so in an extremely intimate scale. The play is performed in what I think is the examining room of a nurse's college. In a way, doing it on such a small scale makes the largeness of the impact possbile.