New Musical Asks, 'How Do We Deal with the End?' (With a Singalong)

Worcester, Massachusetts natives and brothers Daniel Lazour and Patrick Lazour started making theater when they were still kids, they tell EDGE, writing a musical for a school playwrighting contest and then, once they realized that the words they put onto paper really could be brought to life on stage, going on to create new plays that a local theater gave them space, for one weekend a year, to produce.

"These were shaggy productions," Daniel recalls, only to correct himself: "But actually, you'd be surprised – not that shaggy." Professional designers lent their talents, thanks to the intervention their director at the time, Eric Butler, who, Daniel notes, had "a lot of connections" in the local theater world. "It was a really beautiful coming together of the whole community to do these shows," Daniel adds. "Honestly would bring me to tears because it was so beautiful. No one was doing it for money."

"It just goes to show you how far enthusiasm can take you," Patrick, who is two years younger than his brother, adds.

That communal spirit lives on in the brothers' latest work, "Night Side Songs," a production of the American Repertory Theater that's scheduled to play at the Cambridge Masonic Temple from March 27 – April 6 before moving to Hibernian Hall from April 8 - 20. (More details and tickets are available at this link.)

Bringing audiences together for a full-length play that makes singing an integral part of the experience – the songs are written to be easy for the audience to sing and to participate in performing, much like hymns at a church service, the brothers say – "Night Side Songs" makes a cathartic shared experience from the story of Yasmine (Brooke Ishibashi), a woman facing cancer and chemotherapy but finding love, meaning, and her own voice as part of the journey.

The brothers have incorporated some cancer lore into the show; they flash back to 12th Century England with the story of a barmaid who lives a merry, sexually liberated life before finding herself stricken with a "lump felt like a crab that had taken its pincers to her" (a reference to how the word "cancer" itself derives from an ancient word for the scuttling crustacean). Seeking healing through faith and prayer, she is rebuffed; it's her "sinful" life that's led her to this, for surely her illness is divine punishment! At another juncture, the brothers provide a gripping scene from 1962 in which Dr. Emil Freiriech of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, a pioneer of chemotherapy, faces down a hostile, skeptical colleague who accuses him of torturing children at the hospital's leukemia ward. Like a latter-day Leeuwenhoek trying to explain the idea of disease being caused by microorganisms rather than by evil spirits, Dr. Freireich struggles to illuminate for his colleague the paradox of administering poison as a means of curing the dread disease.

But the play mainly focuses on Yasmine, whose oncologist, Dr. Henry Verlaine (Robi Hager), happens to be an old acquaintance – a former classmate with whom, in the eighth grade, she shared a kiss. (Her husband Frank [Jonathan Raviv] struggles with jealousy over this decades-old connection, but he needn't worry: Dr. Verlaine is gay.)

The brothers are no strangers to the A.R.T.; the company produced their Richard Rodgers Award-winning show "We Live in Cairo" in 2019, an uplifting show that captured the hopeful spirit of the Arab Spring.

The Lazours chatted with EDGE to explain a bit about the play's origins, their process, and the importance of song, theater, and community.

EDGE: Is this going to be a world premiere at the A.R.T.?

Patrick Lazour: It's sort of a rolling world premiere. It started in January at the Under the Radar Festival, which is this really cool experimental theater festival in New York. We did a few performances with them, and then we went to Philadelphia Theatre Company, where Taibi Magar is one of the artistic directors, and she's the director of the show.

EDGE: I love how there's a character who is gay. It's not a big deal, but he's upfront about it, and that's a nice bit of representation.

Daniel Lazour: That's one of my favorite scenes, actually. He's always been gay, but he also had that eighth-grade kiss [with Yasmine]. It's a nice, gentle reveal that I think speaks so much about his character. That character so important to Yasmine, and then we get a little glimpse and find out he's not only a doctor, but he's also a caregiver for his husband.

Patrick Lazour: And I really like the joke that he's a Kinsey six. These heavy moments can be punctured so easily with a joke. Frank, in one of the darkest moments of his life, is considering, "Well, they could be together. He's gay, but it could have happened." It shows how our minds can hold so many things at once. Frank is such a thinker, and he just blurts it out.

EDGE: What's it like to be brothers and to be collaborating musically and narratively on theater?

Patrick Lazour: Well, it's a nightmare.

[Laughter]

EDGE: Tell me about the quote by Susan Sontag that is recited at the beginning of the show, and that you've mentioned was a starting point for delving into the idea of illness as something about which you could create a communal theatrical musical experience.

Daniel Lazour: We started this musical in, probably, 2016 and it originally was just a classic book musical about the maverick researchers who staged the first successful chemotherapy trial in the 1960s. But not only that; also, illness and caregivers of patients. We had a good time writing it, but we realized that it wasn't doing a service to the very real, multivalent experience of illness. Part of how we came to that was, people would come to these informal readings we would be doing of this show, and they would immediately start talking about their experience of either going through illness themselves, or caregiving for a loved one who has gone through cancer. We realized that even though the story was inspiring and there were remnants of it in the show that we currently had, we needed to do something a little bit more bespoke than just a book musical. That's how we came upon "Night Side Songs." That Susan Sontag quote was our North Star.

Patrick Lazour: Illness connects us all. It's one of these things where, when you're healthy, it's such a natural thing to look away from illness, to not consider it, so as to enjoy life. But I think by considering it, hopefully we can appreciate life's smallest pleasures even more by all being brave together in the same room and bearing witness to this journey of our protagonist.

EDGE: I told my husband about the play and his response was, "A sing-along about cancer?" It's hard to explain! What is your 30-second elevator description when you're telling people about "Night Side Songs?"

Patrick Lazour: I think we embrace the shock value of that a little bit, but it's a piece of theater that attempts to see illness through a kaleidoscope of theatrical experiments. So, there is communal singing, there's character song, there is naturalistic scene work going on. The great question of, "How do we deal with the end?" is the question that we carry with us every day. This thing that we're all going through, that's just not talked about – can we put it on stage? Can we all look at it together and talk about it?

What's been really nice at Philadelphia Theatre Company is they've been doing great talk backs, and there's going to be some talk backs at A.R.T. as well. Those are sometimes the most exciting, because it's like, someone who hasn't been able to express something or hasn't seen something portrayed, is seeing it and is able to talk about it. I think it's leading to great things, like conversations among family members about what might be the approach for end-of-life care.

Daniel Lazour: What I think I'm most proud of in the show is how we've framed the story around this super-existential question, but we look at these banal things in a different way because of that. I think that's really what the show is about – the way that very simple things in life can be expanded into poetry when you're dealing with mortality.

Patrick Lazour: It is more energizing than you'd expect. The last thing we want people to think is that this a dirge-laden piece of theater. It's very fun, and very funny, and I think you want to see theater that goes there, right? At least, I do. There's something exciting about being a little afraid of how close you're going to get to the edge as an audience member – the edge of whatever. I think that's what's energizing.

Daniel Lazour: The show has strong flavors, but these flavors have been considered. We've considered the flavors. I think a lot of people will enjoy the taste.

"Night Side Songs" plays at the Cambridge Masonic Temple from March 27 - April 6 before moving to Hibernian Hall from April 8 - 20. More details and tickets are available at this link.