Victory Theatre Center’s Terminal Event

Richard Willett’s trenchant new play about science and quackery, life and death

By Steven Leigh Morris

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Marshall McCabe and Laura Coover (Photo by Tim Sullens)

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Among the many denigrations of our era is the national disregard for evidence, where empirical proof is replaced by superstition. Willett’s play cuts to the heart of that conundrum.

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I feel a personal connection to the core ideas in Richard Willett’s new play at the Victory Theatre Center. It’s not a particularly fun connection to recall, and Willett’s play, even with its chronicle of cancer’s ravages upon two characters, is more humane than the actions of my own stepfather, who took it upon himself to preside over the death of my mother from metastatic breast cancer that spread to her liver and beyond.

My stepfather was in many ways like the central character in Willett’s play, Desmond Forrester, played with an energetic blend of haughtiness and pathos by Marshall McCabe. Like Forrester, my stepfather believed in the power of mind over matter to cure cancer. This was co-mingled with a profound distrust of the American medical industry and its mismanagement of public health, propelled by both the profiteering of pharmaceutical companies and the compulsion to cut costs — which would include the cost incurred by doctors spending too much time with patients. 

There is definitely a truth to these convictions, but his beliefs resulted in his hiding prescribed pain relief medications, for her sake of course. This would include morphine at the end of her life — morphine that he insisted was killing her. The hospice nurses finally banned him from the room where she lay dying. Her doctor let it slip that she “can’t stand that man.” Perhaps the most sadistic element of his anti-science/anti medical industry tirades was the implicit blame he placed at her feet for the crimes of having cancer, and of dying from it. If she had stronger willpower, he opined, she could have survived it rather than succumbing to it through their lethal medicines. As though she was a victim of Big Pharma rather than of cancer. (She may well have been a victim of both, and that’s pretty much where playwright Willett lands in his play.)

The difference between my stepfather and Desmond Forrester is that Forrester, a young man and former advertising exec with no time for non-commercial human relations, is diagnosed with colon cancer himself. He turns his “heal thyself” convictions on himself rather than on a spouse. There is collateral damage nonetheless, as there would be with anybody who actually cares for somebody so afflicted. In this case, that would be the brusque, pretty receptionist and would-be actress, Katie Milbrandt (Laura Coover), at the oncology department of Dr. Martin Crossley (John Idakitis), who is treating Forrester.

It’s a bit of a trope that a pair of lonely hearts (the patient and the receptionist), both single and singularly dedicated to emotional self-protection, will ultimately fall in love (a word they’re both hesitant even to utter). Yet, the performances by McCabe and Coover are so finely tuned, under Maria Gobetti’s direction, that — cancer aside — they present a poignant portrait of loneliness in our times.

Idakitis’s doctor is similarly multi-dimensional — suffering by his own admission from anger management issues, yet struggling almost nobly to allow his core decency and wit to rise above his petulance. It’s in Dr. Crossley that Willett’s play contains shards of its humor, along with the piquant satire demonstrated in Milbrandt’s absurd commercial auditions for a pharmaceutical advertising agency.

Counterpoint to the character of Forrester is another of Crossley’s patients, Roberta Kingsley (endearingly portrayed by Randi Lynne Weidman) — another lonely heart as docile and obedient in her quest for a cure as Forrester is defiant. Forrester refuses treatment, believing in home cures. Kingsley follows every protocol. The result is pretty much the same.

She reflects, in one of the play’s most beautiful passages, with languorous poeticism on the almost clinical indifference of the world:

“I worry that some people just slip quietly through their time here unnoticed and then vanish. Like dust. Who will notice I’m gone? The clerks in the deli where I buy my spaghetti? The neighbors who’ll wonder maybe why they don’t hear my TV set? The mailman who I make uncomfortable with my awkward ‘good morning?’ The girls at work, some of whom when I explained that I’d had the flu did not seem to have even noticed that I’d been gone? (beat) It’s quiet here at night. In the hospital. People lower their voices, everything echoes, very softly, have you noticed that? The footfalls. The beeps. All night it goes on. After you and all the other visitors leave. The lights are dim. The stars are out. And it’s so quiet. This place used to frighten me. But now, sometimes, I just want to stay and stay. . .”

None of us is permitted to stay and stay . . . anywhere, except the grave. And occasionally not even there.

The play contains a few anachronistic references, a small complaint contrasted against the greater wisdom emanating from the stage.

Because this isn’t a play just about the medical profession. The crisis of our country right now is embodied in the juxtaposition of the January 6 hearings with the official positions taken by state GOP entities, such as making the claim of the stolen election part of the official party platform. On the one hand are the mountains of documented evidence that the 2020 “stolen election” argument was fraudulent — not even believed by the people promoting it. On the other hand, despite this evidence, “the stolen election” argument is still believed by millions of Americans. Of the 147 House Republicans, only 10 told Reuters in its poll that they don’t believe the “stolen election” narrative. The remaining 90% have neither endorsed nor repudiated the claim, paralyzed by the fear of voter backlash.

Among the many denigrations of our era is the national disregard for evidence, where empirical proof is replaced by superstition. As though the world is flat because so many people believe it to be so, spurning all evidence to the contrary. When you’re trying to move forward as a civilization, this is a huge problem.

Willett’s play, though focused on an oncology department, is about precisely that conundrum: That because medical industry execs may not have public health as their first priority, the science practiced by their doctors is therefore all bunk.

This kind of reasoning was my stepfather’s folly, as it is Forrester’s tragedy. Our penchant for such conflation — disregarding palpable evidence for a larger devotion to faith — may well be our national tragedy too.

Victory Theatre Center, 3326 W. Victory Blvd., Burbank; Fri.-Sat. 8 p.m.; Sun. 4 p.m.; through July 10. https://thevictorytheatrecenter.org. Running time: approximately two hours and thirty minutes, including one 15-minute intermission.