HOW I SPENT MY CANCER VACATION

By Richard Zoglin

Cast members of Saturday Night Live don't often flourish after leaving the show, but Julia Sweeney--who left in 1994 after four seasons and one memorable character, the androgynous Pat--has had more than her share of tribulations. Her marriage to TV writer Stephen Hibbert ended in divorce. Her movie It's Pat opened in just three cities, got bad reviews and was banished to video. Her brother Mike was told he had lymphoma, and she had to take care of him. Then, just weeks before his death in April 1995, Sweeney found out she had cervical cancer.

And what does an ex-Saturday Night Live comic do with that Job-like litany of woes? Why, turn it into an act, of course.

God Said "Ha!", Sweeney's dry-eyed yet wonderfully affecting stage monologue that just opened on Broadway, is not the usual display of wisecracking in the face of tragedy ("How irreverent! How brave!"). For 90 minutes, Sweeney, strolling demurely around a living-room set, simply reminisces about her family, focusing mostly on the last eight months of her brother's life, when he moved into her Los Angeles home so she could nurse him. That she could handle; what she didn't expect was that their parents from Spokane, Washington, would move in as well. The result is a surreal mix of medical drama and family comedy.

In even tones of ironic amusement, Sweeney talks about getting her brother through spinal-tap chemotherapy and convincing her mother that people who call noodles pasta are not just showing off. Black humor prevails even in the darkest hours. When Julia joins her brother as a cancer patient, they start answering the telephone, "International House of Cancer." Just three days after Mike's death, Julia has to undergo a hysterectomy, and her doctor suggests that she might want to harvest a few eggs from her still-functioning ovaries, which could later be fertilized by a sperm donor and carried to term by a surrogate mother. "Oh great," she muses, "now I have to meet a guy and a girl."

Sweeney's medical prognosis is good--her lymph nodes were cancer free, and doctors tell her there is little chance the cancer will recur. But her ordeal is eerily reminiscent of that of another former SNL cast member: Gilda Radner, who died of ovarian cancer in 1989. The two had the same dressing room at SNL and the same doctor at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and oddly, just before Sweeney got her cancer diagnosis, she had agreed to appear at a benefit for the Gilda Radner Foundation to fight ovarian cancer. "I feel guilty talking about her, because it seems like I'm comparing myself to her," says Sweeney, who talks with easygoing candor and a persistent laugh that works like musical accompaniment. "And I don't think that's appropriate." Yet she proudly recalls meeting a cousin of Radner's who told her, "If Gilda had lived, she'd be doing exactly what you're doing right now." Says Sweeney: "It made me feel so happy."

Sweeney took her time getting into show business, spending five years in the accounting department at Columbia Pictures before joining the Groundlings, a Los Angeles improvisational troupe. From there she was plucked for the cast of Saturday Night Live in 1990. Look-ing back on that show--a hotbed of battling egos and brutalized workaholics--Sweeney has mixed feelings. "There were great highs," she says. "On the other hand, it was like a military school that you went to for four years, and you didn't know that the world outside was a nice place. I'm just really glad I used to be there." She made up her mind to quit in February of her fourth season, after spending a night in tears at a friend's house because none of her sketches were getting on the air. "It was like an epiphany. A voice said: 'You know, really, if you're that upset you should leave.'"

God Said "Ha!" grew out of improvised monologues that Sweeney performed at an L.A. comedy club on Sunday nights during Mike's illness, a sort of weekly onstage therapy session. She and a writer friend later put together 45 minutes of her material as a demonstration tape to try to land a network sitcom. Instead she decided to fashion it into a full-length stage work, performing it in San Francisco and Los Angeles before moving it to New York City this month.

Sweeney now has a new boyfriend, a rented apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side and a prospective Broadway hit. The success of her stage confessional has taken her aback a little. "I know it doesn't seem like it, but I'm a really private person," she says with a wondering laugh. "This has been kind of embarrassing."