Maura Campbell Pens An Ode To Recovery

British actor, Stephen Bergman, returns to the stage for a staged reading of award-winning playwright, Maura Campbell's tale of ... Stephen Bergman!

Ms. Campbell, while in London on another project, met Mr. Bergman a short film and read his journal about his ordeal and recovery from Stage 4 throat cancer. So taken with the story, she created MASSIVE. Massive concerns George, a British actor who endures intensive radiation and chemotherapy for a massive throat tumor caused by the HPV virus. Thanks to the morphine treatments, George thinks he's dead - or at least his life is starting to look that way. Left alone with his mother-in-law (who's addicted to online shopping), a pet Beetle named Prince Hal, and the ghost of his dead brother when his wife is rushed to the hospital herself, George confronts the massive upheaval that is the stage show of his life: the roles he's played, the disease, the treatment, his debilitating tracheotomy, and those poor souls in the chemo ward who never made it out, alive. All the while an omnipresent Kafkaesque Creature teaches George that grotesqueness and beauty co-exist in every moment and how to live in the world we create for ourselves.

Massive features Stephen Bergman himself, with Christopher Denham (New York, China Doll, TV, Billions), Marylouise Burke (New York, Kimberly Akimbo, Film, Sideways).

A private (by invitation only) staged reading of the play will be October 29, 2018 at 7PM on Theatre Row, 416 West 42nd Street, New York, NY. For further information, please contact Jay Michaels at JMAE.events@gmail.com or 646-338-5472.

Campbell and Bergman decided that she would create a stage play tackling the disease, treatment and massive upheaval on the family. Bergman provided the film footage and journal for Campbell's research.

Egg & Spoon Theatre Collective sponsors the presentation of this dark comedy directed by Robert Moss.

Ms. Campbell is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter (Los Angeles, Flower Duet, New York, The Song of Bernadette Jones, Edinburgh, Seagull Invasion). Maura Campbell recently received Honorable Mention for her play, President's Day, by the Lotus Lee Foundation in New York. President's Day came in fifth of 410 entries. Robert Moss is founder of Playwrights Horizons in New York and a nationally acclaimed theatre director and teacher.