Type What Now
A World Premiere Play at the New York International Fringe Festival
Conceived, Created, Performed and Produced by Jessie Bear
Directed by Stefan Hartmann
With Anne Flowers
Graphics by Sebastian Soler Moya
Music by Stephen Bennett
Dramaturgy by Erika Marit Iverson
August 17-29, 2015
The White Box at 440 Studios
440 Lafayette Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10003
Tickets: bit.ly/TypeWhatNow
Sick-shaming is a condition I’ve observed much. When my wife got a rare breast cancer that showed up last fall and killed her nine months later at 47, everyone wanted to know if she hadn’t had a mammogram (she had, this kind doesn’t show up on it), or juiced enough, or neglected to be vegan, or paleo, or had too much estrogen in milk products, or similar effects from soy. (We were relieved at our lack of culpability when it turned out that estrogen didn’t matter, because her rare disease was also not hormonally based, and thus unresponsive to the major lifesaving medicines, yay!). At one point I noticed on hospital discharge papers that her BMI put her one point into “obese,” which I was pretty thankful for, since she hadn’t taken one bite of food in three weeks. (In college she used to agitate with ACT UP at the height of the AIDS pandemic, in the ultimate struggle to stop people from being blamed to death.)
So when Jessie Bear lives her story in front of us of developing Type 1 diabetes at 26, it’s the simultaneous story of the not-nearly-as-rare state of self-recrimination, and moralizing from most everyone else, for having brought it on herself — most people don’t manifest it that late in life, and Bear is “overweight” at the start, leading everyone to assume she’s “given herself” the disease through socially unacceptable habits and self-image.
Type What Now takes us through the story she’s been over so many times in her head. Bear is an almost one-woman show, with doctors, acquaintances, boyfriend, et al. played by a game and able Anne Flowers. The voices outside her head blur, as Bear’s initial plummet of weight-loss from the dangerous disease is misjudged by a doctor as a social benefit, and as she prays for the less manageable Type 1 since “it would mean I hadn’t done it to myself.”
Bear recites much of the story and enacts some; the barrage of information and described incident can be overpowering, but is not untrue to the encyclopedias that afflicted people and their loved ones have to digest and often spit out. There is a defense mechanism in the rush of words, but to be vulnerable is not to be pitiable, and when Bear slows down or she and Flowers act out painful, scary or comic interactions, we are let into her life and our sympathy rushes with us.
This is true theater verite, as Bear gets alerts on blood-sugar levels and signals her insulin pump to work a few times during the show. We are seeing her live for her art.
She has beaten the negative body image she grew up with too, and looks back with the right kind of shame at how she viewed herself or other “fat” people facing medical challenges. She realizes that some people who ask about her illness are not accusing; and blesses a human community of sick and well still, so far, living together; and says she’s beautiful and each of the audience is too, and makes us realize why: she is standing before us individual, not alone.
Special thanks: Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons
Fanchild 