Fringe composer and cancer patient Jessica Grace Wing spoke to TONY weeks before she passed away

By Robert Simonson

August, 2003

Lost, an eerie musical meditation on mortality and history written by composer Jessica Grace Wing and prolific downtown verse playwright Kirk Wood Bromley, had its premiere at the Fringe Festival on August 9. Wing was not there to see it. She died on July 19, five days short of her 32nd birthday. Two years earlier, she was diagnosed with colon cancer, and the progress of the disease paralleled that of the show. Bedridden in her last days, Wing never attended a run-through of Lost and never heard the complete score sung live, though hours before she passed, she heard a recording of a Lost rehearsal.

"It's been strange for the company to ride through this with Jessica," Bromley says. "At first, it was like, 'Oh, my God! How can we do a play? We have to stop. Everything has to stop.' Then it became, 'Oh, my God, we have to not stop. We have to do this project no matter what.' "

For Wing, too, work became an imperative. Speaking in a Cobble Hill café on June 7, she said the responsibility of composing a musical had made her predicament infinitely more bearable. "The most therapeutic thing was having this project to do," she explained. "When I had such a bad thing happening in my life, I could be positively focused on something that was beautiful and meaningful. The fact that there are so many strange thematic connections between the play and what I'm going through hasn't been something I've thought about too much."

These common themes include death, dismemberment, lost youth and the unending echoes of history. Wing and Bromley—both members of Off-Off Broadway's Inverse Theater, which is presenting Lost—began their collaboration with the idea of creating a modern interpretation of the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale. The story's child-devouring witch became Mamba, who, with her scientist-doctor husband Laborius, has stayed alive in the Great Smoky Mountains for 400 years by harvesting the limbs and organs of young children she has snatched from the jaws of death. Each "saved but enslaved" child in the show harks back to a different dark chapter of U.S. history. Ivy is one of the accused of the Salem witch trials. Little Wing is a Native American girl about to be eaten by parents made mad by famine. Mazy is a black slave girl almost beaten to death by her master.

Throughout the creative process, Wing endured chemotherapy, radiation treatment, hair loss and the removal of several cancerous organs. "I was writing about young people having their hands cut off and their guts taken out," Bromley says. "You always look for something in a play that will connect you to the themes. That did that in a startling way."

Wing was not disturbed by the parallels, because she was aware that the musical was, in a sense, keeping her alive. She completed the final song the day before she died. "Without this project," she told us, "my spirit would be so much lower and my life empty."

Lost is playing at the New York International Fringe Festival.