Deconstructing Holly

Holly Sidell shared her story of surviving breast cancer in an online show, “Deconstructing Holly,” in December.

Then she said, ““While undergoing cancer surgery to remove my lady parts, I floated in the space between life and death.”

Sidell said she was unsure if she wanted to return to a life in which she feels she has failed as a woman.

But instead, she turned her experience as a time to reflect on her relationships and how they shaped who she was, ultimately turning it into a one-woman play.

Just 38, writer and performer Sidell had endured a double mastectomy and then chemotherapy to fight Stage 2 Triple Negative Breast Cancer. Her reproductive organs were removed to help prevent her high risk of ovarian cancer because of the BRCA gene mutation.

With humor and raw honesty Sidell, who regularly appears in Theatre Palisades productions, embodies a cast of characters who have come and gone in her life.

In her show, she tears apart, piece by piece, her beliefs, her sen

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Writer and Performer Holly Sidell uses candor and humor to explore how breast cancer and losing her reproductive organs due to the BRCA cancer gene helped her discover what it truly means to be a woman.

LOS ANGELES – What happens when everything you’re told makes you a woman is taken away?

At just 38, that was the question writer and performer Holly Sidell was faced with when she had to endure a double mastectomy and chemotherapy to fight Stage 2 Triple Negative Breast Cancer, as well as the removal of her reproductive organs to help prevent her high risk of ovarian cancer due to the BRCA gene mutation. During this time, she wrote about her journey in an honest, humorous, and raw blog, and soon felt a deeper calling to turn those writings into a solo show in the hope that sharing her struggles and healing would bring solace, hope and some laughter to anyone who may be suffering.

Deconstructing Holly will now make its Hollywood Fringe debut this August at the Broadwater Stage B

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“Deconstructing Holly” is a play about loosing everything that we think makes us women.
Holly Sidell had breast cancer and a double mastectomy and she also had Ovarian cancer and a hysterectomy…so isn’t that everything? Fortunately, it is not…but Holly finds this out the hardest way possible. And this is the center of this beautifully written and gorgeously performed show.

You might imagine that this is a dark subject for a solos piece…there are places of sadness and introspection, but somehow her life-changing experiences and her loss are transformed into something far from sorrow. She survived…and more than that she became someone stronger and braver and just more ‘Holly’ and that battle hard won is what inspires her and through this play, us.

This journey is described with candor and a tremendous amount of absolutely brilliant humor, but it’s not played for laughs. The funny is in the real. It’s in the truth and the characters and the unabashed playfulness of Holly herse

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“A show that takes you inside the heart and soul of a cancer survivor, whose transformation into the woman she was always meant to be is passionate, character-filled, bittersweet, joyful, heartbreaking, and ultimately life-saving. Truly a remarkable hour of theater." – Shari Barrett, Broadway World

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