Stage: Saving Tania’s Privates

Tania Katan exists in a very specific niche: America’s foremost Jewish, lesbian cancer survivor. If that sounds interesting to you, you may want to see her latest play.

Robrt L. Pela on Saving Tania’s Privates:

“Not having boobies is not who I am,” she’s saying. “It’s an opportunity for me to say something about being human. Yeah, I’m telling a story about surviving breast cancer, and having had girlfriend trouble, and being part of a crazy family. But in the end, it’s not a story about just any one of those things. It’s about just — I don’t know — living.”

Katan has been living and reliving her victory over breast cancer for decades now — first, of course, in real life, where it was played out as a confusing tragedy about which an imagined Greek chorus kept calling out, “She’s so young!” Later, she re-created this trauma in a locally produced play that described that first diagnosis and mastectomy at age 21. Later, she revisited the subject in a memoir, My One Night Stand with Cancer, published in 2005 and detailing her second battle with cancer and subsequent second mastectomy, an operation that left her, as she likes to say, “like the gecko on the Geico commercials — streamlined and cute.”…full story