Blindsided by "Night Side Songs"
On Having a Genuine Experience(TM)
And then sometimes there’s a Thursday evening in early April when you find yourself in the basement auditorium of the Cambridge Masonic Temple, sobbing.
One of these very good reasons to live in Cambridge, Massachusetts — even as its carapace of self-satisfied urban elitism has been thoroughly dissolved by the acid bath of whatever this last decade has been — is the abundance of cultural products relative to the city’s modest population (120,000).
For instance, you can, as we did, duck out of new-parent orientation night for rising middle-schoolers and, after a 15-minute walk, enter a building you’ve passed many times but never set foot in, take your place among 150 other people in what feels like the set-up for a college or community-theater production (risers on three sides, surrounding the performance area, which is just the auditorium floor) — except the players are all seasoned professionals, each with multiple Broadway credits — and confront mortality: your own and everyone’s.
Commissioned almost a decade ago, “Night Side Songs” is an unusual add-on to the American Repertory Theater season, in that it’s not part of the subscription series1 and it’s not being staged at the A.R.T.’s home on Brattle Street, but in two spots over its three-week run: Cambridge’s Masonic Temple followed by Roxbury’s Hibernian Hall.
The set dressing is sparse: a couple of folding chairs and (later) a hospital bed. A few coats or wraps signaled costume changes. Billed as a “communal music-theater experience,” this means the audience is supposed to sing along. The cast circulates among the audience pre-show, passing out slim booklets with the audience’s song parts. The house lights stay up most of the time.
What with the informality and the decidedly un-A.R.T. vibe, the warning in the program that “[t]his production contains descriptions of cancer treatments as well as discussions of grief, loss of a parent, and terminal illness,” along with a description of how to do a calming “box breath” seemed like overkill. How bad could this be?
Well, buddy.
Night Side Songs takes its name from, and opens with a recitation of, the opening paragraph of Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor:
“Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
The sketchiness of the staging befits the sketchiness of the story, which follows a woman in her early 40s, Yasmine (Brooke Ishibashi), through the discovery, diagnosis and treatment of her breast cancer, its extended remission, her mother’s death, and the night side’s eventual, inevitable end (Spoiler: the ending’s the same for all of us). But we don’t really get to know Yasmine or her mother or Frank, the erstwhile boyfriend who returns after she gets sick and whom she eventually marries.
She lives in Worcester, Mass., near her meddlesome worrywart mother (Mary Testa), with whom Yasmine is on the phone when she first feels the lump. At this point the program’s warnings started to make sense: the first audience member, after a sharp little gasp of recognition, left the theater, dabbing at her eyes. She did not return.
The power of the show derives not from our investment in Yasmine’s story — the complicated yet loving maternal relationship, the on-again, off-again boyfriend who finally shows up for good —but from the dramatization of moments common to those who have sojourned on or had contact with the night side.
Robi Hagar plays Yasmine’s doctor and also serves as the audience conductor, singing out the lines to demonstrate the melody, then inviting us to join in. In the second number, “Either Way You Gotta Keep it Together,” those lines make explicit the scrambling in the mind of the newly-diagnosed: “Sometimes you don’t know/Sometimes you just know/Either way you gotta keep it together/Either way you gotta keep it together.”
In “The Reason,” we’re made complicit in that unsavory-but-not-unusual experience of trying to find the cause of a friend or acquaintance’s unpleasant diagnosis. “Ah Ah Ah Ah,” is the audience’s chorus, repeated after each verse, during which the song’s gossips land on the reason — smoking, drinking, being a nasty person, having generally bad karma, spuriouser and spuriouser — for the illness. It’s selfish and self-preservatory. We want to make some sense of the senselessness, to puzzle out how the unfortunate deserves their misfortune, even as we may know, intellectually, that “deserve” has nothing to do with it.
Then there’s “A Little Wine Tonight,” in which Yasmine and Frank (Jonathan Raviv) drink more than a little too much the night before she has to go back for her second round of chemotherapy. They really shouldn’t, but they’re seizing the evening with a drug that is not more poisonous than the ones she’ll be taking in the morning: “a little wine is fine tonight/as long as I’m with you.”
Interspersed with Yasmine’s story are set pieces from what I guess we might call the history of medical treatment, or perhaps a history of attitudes toward terminal illness. We meet Prudence (Mary Testa, again), a 12th-century English innkeeper beholden to myth and superstition who treats the festering abscess on her chest with leeches and potions and, finally, pilgrimage to the Bishop of Worcester.
In the next one it’s the 1950s, and we peer in on a meeting at Johns Hopkins2 where a doctor is arguing with his colleagues to treat their patients — children with leukemia — with a cocktail of drugs rather than the single drug they’ve been using to slightly prolong some of their patients’ lives. It’s the advent of chemotherapy, championed by a doctor whose brusque bedside manner — he can’t handle the raw emotion of parents facing the loss of their children — belies the fervor with which he advocates for the new treatment.3
Later we’re on the beach in Santa Cruz, with a barefoot beach bum and folk singer, Harris (Jordan Dobson) who, in addition to eschewing chemotherapy, was probably not up to date on his vaccinations when he died in 2008, leaving behind, as he noted in his self-penned obituary, “his smokin’ hot girlfriend.”
The show is tender toward all of its people and their varied approaches in facing mortality with information they had at the time.
After eight years of remission, the drug that banished Yasmine’s tumor has produced one of its known side effects and given her leukemia. Frank’s anger at the doctor is misdirected but understandable. His wife knew this was a risk, but some how Frank never did, or had forgotten that knew it.
This seems to me to be when the show’s perspective shifts. We have been, up until now, looking over the patient’s shoulder, considering things from Yasmine’s point of view. But we learn from Frank’s conversation with the doctor that she has collapsed, catastrophically, at home, and they are now left to figure out a plan on her behalf. We are now looking over Frank’s shoulder. There is a point, on the night side, from which one cannot report back.
We saw the show on April 2, 2025, three years and a day after my father died and just over three weeks shy of the 20th anniversary of Katie’s mother’s death4. Katie was teary at some early points in the show. We held hands, off and on. Throughout, I had competing impulses — I was impressed by each performance, but I also often found myself wanting the song to be over.
After the perspectival shift — the anger at the doctors, the audience song parts (“I won’t know what to say/But I will check in on you every day”), the hospital bed — I felt myself welling up, a knot in my chest growing.
The final number was a round, in three parts.
The first group had these lines:
“WILL YOU LET ME KNOW
I CAN LET YOU GO?
CAN YOU SOFTLY SAY
YOU WILL BE OKAY?”
Group 2 sang:
FIGHTING FOR YOU MY LIFE
FIGHTING FOR YOU MY LIFE (4x)
ALL I NEED’S YOUR TOUCH
ALL I NEED’S YOUR TOUCH (4x)
WELCOME ME IN SHOW ME OUT
WELCOME ME IN SHOW ME OUT (4x)
Group 3 (our group) had these lines:
AH AH
AH AH…
I’m not much of a singer, but I couldn’t even handle that. My face was in my hands, I was hiccuping with (mostly) silent sobs. One of the actors (Dobson) handed Katie a tissue to hand to me.
It was, as I say, the hospital bed, the anger at doctors, the goodbye that isn’t quite the goodbye you want to say.
—
There was no curtain call. Who could possibly have had the energy?
Katie and I walked anticlimactically back up Mass. Ave..
“I’m glad we saw it, and I’m glad it’s there,” I said. “But I don’t want to see it again.”
For a few years, Katie and I have subscribed, which means we get tickets four highly-polished professional theater productions a year, whether we’re interested in the show or not. This has had the welcome side effect of turning us into amateur connoisseurs. The subscription seems to relieve us of the pressure of talking ourselves into liking a given show simply because we’ve blown one of our limited date nights and a couple hundred of our limited dollars on it. (“Evita” was very loud. “Life Of Pi” went to Broadway, and while the multi-person puppetry was impressive the script treated its audience like babies. The recent “Odyssey” was a mess, only partially salvaged by a few nifty set pieces.)
I think? I wasn’t taking notes at this point.
While the show insists we think about the really important matters — we’re only here for a little while, what will we do with the time? — it was impossible to ignore that the treatment breakthrough they dramatize here was thanks entirely to government funding and is currently impossible.
From pancreatic and lung cancers, respectively. And, in case you’re looking for “The Reason” the answers to “did they smoke?” are yes and no, respectively.