Daniel Sakow, Senior Staff Photographer

It’s been said that life imitates art, but in an upcoming production at San Diego State, art attempts to imitate life.

“Blue Ducks: Conversations about Cancer” is the tentative title of a new play being written by award-winning playwright Patricia Loughrey and is directed by licensed physician’s assistant and recent SDSU grad uate Marybeth Bielawski-DeLeo.

The play is actually based on a project that began in the fall of 1989, when a graduate student in the School of Communication at SDSU put a recording device on his phone and began taping his conversations. He did this to study social structure as it occurs in natural conversation.

It just so happened that on the first night he was recording, he received news from his father that would change his life forever – his mother had been diagnosed with large-cell cancer.

Over a period of 13 months – from the time of his mother’s diagnosis to the time of her death – the student recorded 60 phone calls. The conversations were between him and family, friends and service providers. In one of the last phone calls, he told a friend that his mother had only hours to live.

After his mother’s death, the student donated these tapes – with his family’s permission – to Wayne Beach, Ph. D., a professor in SDSU’s School of Communication.

Beach teaches courses on conversational analysis, and his book “A Natural History of Family Cancer: Interactional Solutions to Medical Problems,” is being published this fall.

“Blue Ducks,” based on Beach’s book and the graduate student’s experience, is a collection of scenes in which the taped conversations are acted out in person. The challenge for the actors is to use the exact voice intonations that’s heard on the tapes when acting out this dialogue.

“They’re playing their lines in a way they would not have ordinarily chosen,” Loughrey said.

The script will be revised over the summer and is premiering at SDSU this fall.

“The title will probably change by the fall but it will be as is through the March readings,” Loughrey said. “The play is in process and we won’t really know the right title until it has matured.”

She said the purpose of this production is to educate people in the medical community on how to better interact with families in crisis.

Loughrey has written several well-received, educational plays including the award-winning HIV prevention show “Secrets” and “The Inner Circle,” seen worldwide in more than 500 productions.

A play of hers that might be more familiar to students is “Lord Derby’s Giant Eland,” which was presented at SDSU last spring.

Upcoming staged readings of “Blue Ducks” begin at 7 p.m. today through Thursday and again at 7 p.m. next Thursday in Scripps Cottage and are free to the public..

In addition, a reading will be held at 7 p.m. next Tuesday at UCSD in the Goldberg Auditorium, Moores Cancer Center. The reading will be followed by a discussion about the material with audience participation.

“We are very optimistic that the readings will serve the three-fold purpose: let us test the material in front of an audience and receive their input,” Loughrey said. “We will also get their input on where to take the play – how to get it to an audience in the community that will benefit from seeing it.

“Thirdly, (the reading will) begin to make the community aware of the play and begin to build community partners for future productions.”

-Updates on ‘Blue Ducks’ will be provided throughout the semester as it progresses and matures.