As a notorious crier, I expected to cry. Even had my tissues in hand. Not a single tear was milked from my eye.

It was all tell not show. The amount of cliche cancer/illness platitudes and sayings was wild—it felt word for word from motivational cancer support forums. At some point I worried part of this was written by genAl bc of how many cliches were in the script.

A friend warned me to sit in the front row because she couldn't hear when she came to an earlier showing. And yeah...she was right. Only one actor knew how to project. Because they play the ambient hospital sounds so loudly, and so many of the actors would mutter away from the audience, I had to strain my ears even in the first row. And this is a small theatre. I don’t think the ambient noise, that seemed to randomly start and stop, nor the lights changing colours were effective. Again, because every thought, feeling, and plot point was explained in detail by the characters rather than shown to us on stage.

Maybe it was an off night, or a consequence of a flat script, but the performances didn't really move me either. I felt like I was watching archetypes, not characters. Just because an archetype tells me to feel bad for them doesn’t mean that I will.