When the pandemic shut down TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s season early in 2020, Jessica Dickey was worried that her play “Nan and the Lower Body” would be a casualty.

“I kept thinking the play would be cancelled,” says the playwright.

Instead, TheatreWorks rescheduled the play’s world premiere for this summer, a move that proved timely, since “Nan” deals with reproductive health issues.

“Once everything blistered in the country over Roe vs. Wade, I guess it’s a positive thing for the play to have been delayed,” Dickey says. “It’s been thrilling to watch the play meet this political moment.”

While audiences may view the play, set to open July 13, through a lens tinged by the recent Supreme Court decision, Dickey’s reasons for writing the play were more personal than political. After the death of her grandmother, who worked as a cytologist before multiple sclerosis forced her to quit, Dickey’s uncle told her that her grandma had worked with Dr. George Papanicolaou, inventor of the Pap smear.

While she never found evidence to support this claim, Dickey says, “The play became the way to dream that possibility.

“The impulse for the play was a personal one,” she adds. “It was written before recent events to honor my grandmother.”

In the play, the character of Nan Day represents Dickey’s grandmother. As Dr. Pap’s assistant, Nan helps him develop the method for detecting reproductive cancers in women.

Dickey says she was impressed by the way Dr. Pap developed the technology and pushed for its widespread use. And whether or not her grandmother was actually part of the Pap smear’s development, it was easy for the playwright to imagine her there.

“Cancer was the No. 1 killer of women because we were only detecting it after it was too late,” she says. “What it meant for this young woman to be learning and pioneering this technology that revolutionized women’s health while she herself was losing use of her lower body is a truth from my grandmother’s life.

“Very few women had careers then, and she was making a really interesting one at a time when her body was failing her.”

Dickey learned more about her grandmother’s profession while doing research for “Nan” with a doctor at Sloan Kettering.

“I understand why I get Pap smears,” she says, “but I was really humbled and shocked that I didn’t know much about it.

“I looked at a slide, and it was mind-blowing how many cells were on it and how difficult it is to see the cancerous ones.”

While Dickey, who is also an actor, will write family members into her scripts, she has only performed in two of her own plays: “The Amish Project”—the first play she wrote—and in a play she recently workshopped.

“Otherwise,” she says, “I don’t really write for myself to be in them.”

“Nan and the Lower Body” was workshopped at TheatreWorks’ 2019 New Works Festival. Dickey says the experience was “very fun and really useful and rewarding.”

Three years later, Dickey says seeing her play fully staged is deepening her ties to her late grandmother.

“The moments that are most privately moving to me in rehearsal,” she adds, “are finding I’m watching the character of Nan describe what she’s going through and realizing that’s why I wrote the play.”

“Nan and the Lower Body” runs July 13-Aug. 7 at Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. Ticket prices start at $30 at theatreworks.org or 877-662-8978.

Source: www.mercurynews.com