Confronting the Past, Dreaming of the Future

HeLa – Sideshow Theater Company

HeLa, a new play by J. Nicole Brooks, produced by the Sideshow Theater Company premiered at the Greenhouse Theater Center this weekend. The play weaves together three stories.  First, there is the true story of Heniretta Lacks, a black woman who died in 1951 of cervical cancer. Cells taken from her excised tumor were found to have a unique quality: they could survive indefinitely under laboratory conditions.  Every prior attempt in any lab to keep human cells alive had ultimately failed, so the importance of this discovery cannot be overstated. It opened up untold fields of research that reverberate today. Henrietta Lacks was neither informed of nor did she or her surviving family give consent to her cells being used for research purposes. Even so, the cell line was called HeLa, taken from the first two letters of her first and last name. The second story centers on a young black girl living on Chicago’s west side thirty years later, in 1981. She’s bright and captivated by science.  She sneaks down to the basement to watch Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. She begs her aunt to let her miss a day of school to see a solar eclipse at the Adler Planetarium.

The third element is the hardest to reduce to a written summary. A lone astronaut looks back at the ‘pale blue dot’ — sad and angry about its flaws, but still missing it just a little. Her appearances break up the scenes of the other two storylines and form much of the connective tissue that holds the stories together. I hesitate to say more, partly because I think there is a certain joy to be had in watching it unfold on its own, and partly because I just feel unqualified to say more.

Anyone familiar with The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and the HBO movie based on that book should be familiar with the issues of informed consent and privacy her story involves. Rather than focus on or simply recapitulate those issues in this play, Brooks stitches together the many ways Lacks was treated as less than a person throughout her treatment, not just at the end. It starts with with a nurse who quickly and curtly tries to reduce her history to a series of yes/no questions on a clipboard and continues from there. At no stage of her treatment does any person responsible for her care speak to her directly, honestly or with any degree of empathy. Her story contrasts with the little girl’s, where we discover what happens when someone is seen and nurtured as the person they are by the people around them. She flourishes. It is a joy to watch her boundless enthusiasm and thirst for knowledge, and more joyful still to see it encouraged by the people who surround her.

The issue of race obviously pervades the story. Medical science has made untold advances worth untold millions, all derived from a woman who wasn’t allowed to walk in the front door of the hospital that treated her. Without giving too much away, I think the show did a masterful job in portraying how exhausting that unending series of small indignities is. I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but I don’t think I’m in a place to say more than that.

The performances across the board are excellent. Playing both the roles of Henrietta Lacks in 1951 and the little girl’s aunt in 1981, Nicole Michelle Haskins anchors the show. I saw her recently as Dotty in Firebrand’s production of Caroline or Change, and she was great there, too.  She infused both characters with warmth and resilience. Ayah Sol Masai Hall as the Little Girl was the best. She did a wonderful job conveying the character’s limitless enthusiasm. Something I can find annoying about child actors is the tendency to act preternaturally like adults, but not here. Hall managed to portray a very bright and curious 8-year-old but still an actual 8-year old.

Ultimately, there is a lot to digest in this play. I’ve been thinking about it for the better part of two days now, and I’m not sure I could sum up the show in any concise way. I’m not entirely sure I’m supposed to. What I’ll say is this: both the experience of watching the show and the time I’ve spent mulling over its images and themes has been by turns haunting and lovely. I’ve said a few times in this review that I felt unqualified to speak more deeply on what the play has to say, because the issues and experiences are not ones I have experienced personally. I can think of few better reasons to go see a show.

Highly Recommended

Reviewed by Kevin Curran

Presented November 18 – December 23 by Sideshow Theater Company at Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave., Chicago.

Tickets are available in person at the box office, by calling 773-404-7336  or by visiting www.greenhousetheater.org/hela.

Additional information about this and other area productions can be found at www.theatreinchicago.com.