Andrea Parson’s one-woman show You Can’t be Serious feels particularly prescient in its subject matter, the loss of her younger sister to cancer. Her show has been in development for four years with Portland’s From the Ground Up, under the direction of Katherine Murphy Lewis, and most recently on tour, ending with a quartet of late May shows at Bag&Baggage in Hillsboro, Parson’s hometown.

Parson’s story provides a glimpse into grappling with the harsh reality of early-onset cancer and personal loss, a harbinger of grief and struggle for many unsuspecting families. And, perhaps most crucially, Parson demonstrates how this personal tragedy brought about a new understanding of what it means to live and love.

I had the pleasure of seeing an earlier version of Parson’s show early on in its development, in 2022. Now, the subject of early-onset cancer rears its head with more frequency than it did three years prior. As the National Cancer Institute wrote, rates have risen most starkly in adults between the ages of 20 and 29. As detailed in her show, Parson’s sister Christina passed from aggressive breast cancer at age 31, as a wife and mother of two young children.

Through You Can’t Be Serious, Parson offers reflection and wisdom about this experience in the form of adept storytelling, physical theater, emotive dancing and even a dash of humor.

Parson, a noted dancer and choreographer and Prince Grace Dance Fellowship winner who for several years was a mainstay of Portland’s NW Dance Project, opened the performance I saw at Bag&Baggage’s Vault Theatre with an informal address to the audience, letting us know that the evening would be filmed and hinting at moments of future audience engagement by inviting a few folks to dance with her onstage. She then paused briefly before moving into expressive dancing, grappling on the floor as the lights changed to blue, marking the beginning of her story.

Using montages of personal stories and metaphors, Parson expressed the complexities of her journey. She spoke about the sinking of the supposedly unsinkable Titanic, the shock and denial that likely overwhelmed the passengers, drawing comparison to her own traumatic experience of finding out about her sister’s diagnosis. She referred to her Catholic upbringing and quibbles with God about her own tragedy. She also spoke about her periods of careful eating, juxtaposing this behavior with her sister’s love of cookies — even weed cookies (one of which Parson accidentally consumed). Cookies become a symbol of enjoyment of life’s pleasures and messiness. 

Toward the end of the show, Parson crumbled and destroyed a bag of cookies during a grief-riddled moment onstage, and then swam around in their residue, finding a way to revel in the mess.

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Perhaps Parson has moved through the supposed “stages of grief” —denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — but the path through this process in her performance remained decidedly nonlinear and was expressed, most viscerally, through moments of dancing. Her tale was also anchored by moments of sitting on and interacting theatrically with a stool on the right-hand side of the stage. The stool became a shelter to comedically cower behind as she described her lifelong fear of death, a mammogram machine, and a park bench — a site of return.

Parson found potent ways to articulate the most confounding aspects of aggressive cancer diagnosis, such as the fact that breast cancer is highly studied yet not well understood, and the fact that society has managed to engineer countless types of pasta (including banana pasta), yet somehow cancer is incurable — a realization made offhand in the aisles of a grocery store.

During one informal moment, Parson asked many different audience members whether they were afraid of death. Some said yes, others said no, still others were unsure. Toward the end of the performance, she returned to us with another question, asking the whole theater, “are you afraid of love?”

She spoke about her sister’s legacy and what she had learned about the mess of loving from Christina and the way she had chosen to live her life. In this way, You Can’t be Serious moves beyond the tropes of a one-person show into unexpectedly relatable territory that cuts deep. Here, Parson brings evident self-reflection and personal growth to bear.

In my own life, cancer diagnosis in my circle feels less and less anomalous than it ever has. Parson’s show served to both underscore and provide a balm for this reality.

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In early April 2025 Parson talked with Lori Tobias about “You Can’t Be Serious” before a pair of performances in Astoria. See Tobias’s resulting story for ArtsWatch here.

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