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Through 82 playoff games, the average margin of victory is 14.7 points, easily the highest in NBA history. Nineteen playoff games, almost a full quarter of them, have been decided by 25+ points. And though we’re only three games in, so far this has also been the least competitive NBA Finals ever.
There’s a raw spot — one of the tenderest places on the continent of human emotions — that exists between laughter and pain. Make that between laughter and everything that feeds pain: rage, hatred, desperation, hopelessness, fear, even physical disease.
Such is the location of Halley Feiffer’s “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center of New York City,” a play that is as deeply felt as its name is long. To be literal, its setting is a sickeningly pink double room in the hospital of its title.
But as anyone who’s spent much time in similar rooms knows, antechambers to death are incubators for those guffaws that it’s hard to distinguish from sobs, places where you find yourself fighting a close battle with the urge to giggle madly. To give in to such an impulse, in such a context, would be very, very inappropriate.
Or would it? “Funny Thing,” which opened on Tuesday night at the Lucille Lortel Theater, makes a convincing case that hard laughter is an absolutely appropriate response, if not a socially sanctioned one, to those moments when life seems like too bad a joke not to respond otherwise.
