MANILA, Philippines – Why is cancer?

The question plunges the audience into the very mystery of the human condition.

Cancer was the terrifying thing in 9-year-old Dani Lyons’ world. For her mother, Katharine, it was the prospect of losing Dani, whom she had had to raise by herself ever since Dani’s father walked out on both of them, which, too, is quite a terrifying experience.

Something of the child every person once was gets lost as they go through things that make them suffer: heartbreak, disease, loss, death. The wide-eyed excitement over what the future could bring yields to disappointment, fear, and despair as life takes its determined, careless course.

In Dani Girl: A Musical About Hope, the audience catches Dani and Katharine on that brink between hope and despair. Dani’s cancer has returned. Religious Katharine is determined to pray their way through the ordeal, while Dani seems unaware of how serious her condition is. She whiles the day away playing and daydreaming she is everywhere else but her hospital room.

That is, until Dani loses all her hair to chemotherapy. Then it sinks in, but instead of cowering, she decides to fight for her hair, and for her life.

On the surface, Dani Girl is the story of a girl on a quest to get back her hair, because she seemed to tolerate cancer robbing her of many things, but losing her hair was the last straw.

An “Angel of Death” – we’re never sure whether he’s real or just Dani’s imagination – plays fairy-godmother-in-reverse and poses the question in game show fashion – Why is cancer? – and if Dani finds the answer, she gets her hair back.

That is, before cancer gets her first.

Cancer cells may be stubborn, but so is a little girl on a mission to grow back her hair.

With her hospital buddy Marty, who’s battling Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, Dani embarks on an epic playtime adventure through outer space, human anatomy, and unearthly realms, all within the cancer ward.

Throughout, Katharine muddles through her own struggle, rosary beads in hand. Dani is the only thing that remains of the fairy tale she once lived. Now, her husband, the King of her imaginary world, has left the Queen and the Princess to fight a fearsome dragon all by themselves.

Katharine prays, Dani and Marty play, and though seemingly worlds apart, their quest is the same: for answers, for life. And their fuel is hope, which they draw from each other when their own supply dwindles.

But what is hope against the finality of cancer? What can anyone win over a terminal case of the disease?

Cancer – witnessing it, battling it, or losing someone to it – is quite unfortunately a universal experience and Dani Girl is cathartic for anyone on that level.

But when Dani Lyons asks God, “Why is cancer?” (Yes, she meets God at some point, and she isn’t dead when she does) she is also asking the question for everyone else who’s grappling with anything that’s turning their fairy tale into a tragedy.

Why is pain? Why is suffering?

God ventures an answer, and it isn’t what many people, especially the religious, might expect, but it offers hope.

Dani and Marty go through the entire gamut of rationalizations people use to explain suffering – that there is a logic behind it, and so there must be a logical way out of it. And maybe that’s why the creators of Dani Girl chose to tell the story of a suffering child. It is the most unreasonable of life’s injustices, as any human being would perceive it.

When a child with cancer asks – “Why is cancer?” – we all want to know the answer. – Rappler.com

Dani Girl: A Musical About Hope, produced by The Sandbox Collective and 9Works Theatrical, runs Saturdays and Sundays until September 1 at the Carlos P. Romulo Auditorium at RCBC Plaza, Ayala Ave., cor. Gil Puyat Ave., Makati City. For tickets, visit www.ticketworld.com.ph.