Actor comedian puts cancer center stage at Piccolo Spoleto Festival

When actor and stand-up comedian David Lee Nelson takes center stage at Pure Theatre during the 2018 Piccolo Spoleto festival this month, it’s an odd subject he’ll brand with his sense of humor. It’s his own stage 4 colon cancer diagnosis. 

It’s no joking matter, which is exactly why Nelson, who gets his chemotherapy treatment at Hollings Cancer Center at the Medical University of South Carolina, made the show so funny.

“I like to find serious things and find the humor in them. Cancer is such a tense topic. It’s just asking for release. It’s just asking for comedy. Comedy also is about human beings facing things they are unequipped to handle. This is something we are unequipped to handle. As humans, the best we can do is laugh about it.”

Nelson, 39, has gotten a lot of practice during the past year.

Diagnosed with advanced colon cancer at 38, he began blogging to make sense of what is a life-altering, mind-boggling experience. Nelson got such positive responses about the blog, he decided to turn it into a solo performance for Piccolo Spoleto. The play, aptly named “Stages,” opens May 26 and runs through June 9.

The College of Charleston graduate spent a decade in New York City as a stand-up comedian and got his Master of Fine Arts from the Alabama Shakespeare Festival through a joint program with the University of Alabama. He moved to Atlanta in August 2016 with his girlfriend and was taking advantage of film and television opportunities when he began to have stomach pains. He tried to ignore them, attributing the pain to bad food.

In January, the pain couldn’t be ignored anymore. Finally, after a couple of trips to the emergency department, he was referred to a specialist who found the source of the pain. A CT scan revealed a tumor. When he had surgery to remove a 9-centimeter tumor that had burst through his intestines, he knew why he had been in such severe pain.

“A semi-hemi colectomy. That was the name of the surgery done by a gentlemen named Dr. Sharma,” he said of his surgeon at Emory University Hospital.

As he describes it in his solo show: “He cut me open; unpacked everything; laid it out on the table; removed the damaged part of my large intestine, part of my smaller intestine, and forty lymph nodes. He then reattached my colon, stuffed everything back inside, stapled me up, and I have never seen the man since.

“Whenever I get depressed about the state of the world, I think about the fact that people know how to cut other people open, remove damaged parts of our bodies, put us back together, without killing us. How amazing is that?”

Nelson, who ended up moving back to his hometown of Greenville, South Carolina, halfway through his treatment, said he has learned how common this is for young people. “I’m part of a trend of people in their 20s and 30s getting colon cancer. It was weird. The day I went in for my surgery, CNN and the New York Times each had articles about people in their 30s getting colon cancer.”

The play isn’t about that, though. It’s about how cancer or other serious conditions alter how life is experienced, not only for the people who are sick but for everyone who loves them, he said.

When an oncologist at Emory broke the news to him, she was brilliant, he recalled. “She said, ‘Anyone can get hit by a bus at any time.’ That’s the first thing she said to me. I said, ‘Oh, I have cancer, don’t I?’ And she said, ‘Yes, you do.’ It was the best way to get the news though. It’s absolutely true. Anything can happen to anyone at any time. I just happen to have more of a tactile handle on it.”

That “tactile handle” became fodder for his art.

“Art and theater are how we understand the world around us. To try and make sense of this has been such an important part of my healing. I decided early on I would make this an artistic endeavor. So when I’d get sick, I’d think, ‘Oh great, more stuff to write about tomorrow.’ It was great being able to write through this experience.”