Cast members of Saturday Night Live don't often flourish after leaving the show, but Julia Sweeney--who left in 1994 after four seasons and one memorable character, the androgynous Pat--has had more than her share of tribulations. Her marriage to TV writer Stephen Hibbert ended in divorce. Her movie It's Pat opened in just three cities, got bad reviews and was banished to video. Her brother Mike was told he had lymphoma, and she had to take care of him. Then, just weeks before his death in April 1995, Sweeney found out she had cervical cancer.
And what does an ex-Saturday Night Live comic do with that Job-like litany of woes? Why, turn it into an act, of course.
God Said "Ha!", Sweeney's dry-eyed yet wonderfully affecting stage monologue that just opened on Broadway, is not the usual display of wisecracking in the face of tragedy ("How irreverent! How brave!"). For 90 minutes, Sweeney, strolling demurely around a living-room set, simply reminisces about her family, focusing mostly on the last eight months of her brother's life, when he moved into her Los Angeles home so she could nurse him. That she could handle; what she didn't expect was that their parents from Spokane, Washington, would move in as well. The result is a surreal mix of medical drama and family comedy.
In even tones of ironic amusement, Sweeney talks about getting her brother through spinal-tap chemotherapy and convincing her mother that people who call noodles pasta are not just showing off. Black humor prevails even in the darkest hours. When Julia joins her brother as a cancer patient, they start answering the telephone, "International House of Cancer." Just three days after Mike's death, Julia has to undergo a hysterectomy, and her doctor suggests that she might want to harvest a few eggs from her still-functioning ovaries, which could later be fertilized by a sperm donor and carried to term by a surrogate mother. "Oh great," she muses, "now I have to meet a guy and a girl."
Sweeney's medical prognosis is good--her lymph nodes were cancer free, and doctors tell her there is little chance the cancer will recur. But her ordeal is eerily reminiscent of that of another former SNL cast member: Gilda Radner, who died of ovarian cancer in 1989. The two had the same dressing room at SNL and the same doctor at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and oddly, just before Sweeney got her cancer diagnosis, she had agreed to appear at a benefit for the Gilda Radner Foundation to fight ovarian cancer. "I feel guilty talking about her, because it seems like I'm comparing myself to her," says Sweeney, who talks with easygoing candor and a persistent laugh that works like musical accompaniment. "And I don't think that's appropriate." Yet she proudly recalls meeting a cousin of Radner's who told her, "If Gilda had lived, she'd be doing exactly what you're doing right now." Says Sweeney: "It made me feel so happy."