AT THE START of Quacks & Whacks: A Cancer Comedy, four singing puppets introduce themselves as cancer cells. They start in the lungs, hide from a biopsy needle, tell stories around a campfire, and then travel to the brain, their next campsite. These campy cancer cells, the audience learns, are inside the character of Sharon, a public school teacher who is diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer years after a lung biopsy comes up negative.

When Terry Miller, a retired theater teacher in Los Angeles, was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer, she imagined cancer cells camping inside her body and making s’mores. She mentioned this image so often that her daughter Amanda Miller, a playwright and actress in Brooklyn, New York, suggested they write a play together about the experience of having cancer. Quacks & Whacks: A Cancer Comedy, which debuted April 4 at the theater festival New York City Fringe, is the result of that collaboration.

One might think that writing a play during cancer treatment would be difficult, but for Terry Miller, it was quite the opposite, she tells Cancer Today. “When I met with Amanda [to write], the struggle seemed less intense because we were venting through the writing,” Terry says. “And laughing at it,” adds Amanda, who sat beside her mother in a video call. “And laughing at it,” Terry continues. “We would think, ‘OK, now, how can we present this, and how can we make this funny and serious at the same time?’”

Terry and Amanda Miller at Amanda’s wedding in 2023. Terry was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer in 2022. Photo courtesy of Amanda Miller

Like the character Sharon, Terry’s cancer experience began with a lung biopsy, which was negative for cancer. Five years later, in 2022 and at age 74, she was diagnosed with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer. “It was just metastasizing all that time,” Amanda says.

Quacks & Whacks translates and magnifies Terry’s experiences and frustrations with the health care system into Sharon’s misadventures. At her first visit with an oncologist, Sharon parks in a garage at the oncologist’s office and encounters a sign that reads: “Stairs to elevator.” What follows is a sort of dance to accordion music in which Amanda, who also acts in the play, runs around the theater holding signs that read things like “More stairs!” as Sharon limps behind.

Terry says this scene is her favorite in the play and was inspired by the parking garage at the medical center where she receives treatment. “You have to drive around and around and around until you find a spot, and then there are stairs to the elevator, and the elevator isn’t always working,” she says. “So that is very real and in looking at it, laughable but ridiculous.”

Although the events in the play aren’t drawn strictly from Terry’s life with cancer, the play’s absurdity is. For example, a clinical trial Terry is participating in requires her to have scans within particular time windows. Yet scheduling these appointments is an ordeal. Once, when she called her local hospital to schedule a scan, she was told that there were no appointments available within the time window. She asked to be put on a waiting list but was told that she couldn’t do that without an existing appointment—which she couldn’t make because the appointment had to be within the trial time window.

“That kind of absurd thing that she just spoke about, that’s the ethos of the play,” Amanda says.

The director and cast of Quacks & Whacks: A Cancer Comedy. Clockwise from left, Catt Filippov, Katie Kopajtic, Amanda Miller and Bryan Fernandez. Photo by Mike Chiodo

The “whacks” that Sharon faces in the play go beyond logistics and the physical symptoms of cancer treatment; they include emotional hits as well. Sharon asks how long she has to live, and her doctor responds with a shrug. In the context of the play, the shrug is funny. Yet the question and the uncertain answer also capture the fear that comes with having a life-threatening illness. When Terry received her diagnosis, the doctor told her that she had three to five years to live. “Now, when I ask the question—I’m in year four—the doctor says, ‘I don’t know,’” Terry says.

Through writing this comedy, Terry wanted to show people what it was like—and it’s not funny—to have cancer in the U.S. today. That clear sense of purpose was another benefit that writing the play provided, Terry says. “It helped me feel like, ‘OK, I’m not working, but I have a goal here now to try and let people know what it’s like.’”

Quacks & Whacks: A Cancer Comedy is part of New York City Fringe in April 2025. The two remaining shows will be Tuesday, April 15, and Sunday, April 20, both in person at the Chain Theatre (312 W. 36th Street, 4th floor, New York City) and via livestream. Tickets are available here.

Ashley P. Taylor is a writer and science journalist based in New York City.