Debut Fringe Festival play explores childhood cancer with Canadian Blood Services partnership

A play at the Edmonton Fringe Festival called "Hearts Left Open" is encouraging others to join the stem cell registry.

An original play set in a pediatric cancer unit is set to take the stage during Edmonton’s International Fringe Festival – not just to tug on the heartstrings, but to raise awareness about life-saving stem cell services.

Hearts Left Open was created by playwright Lee-Anna Semenyna, who based it on her own experiences navigating her brother’s battle with leukemia.

“It’s based on the things I saw and felt and thought as we went through that, waiting for him to get a bone marrow transplant, watching him kind of deteriorate through that process,” Semenyna said.

The play follows the journey of two women who meet in the hallway of a pediatric cancer unit, one with her daughter and one with her nephew.

“It follows them over a year of their time in the hospital as they deal with grief, loss, hopelessness, helplessness, frustration, anger, all the emotions that come with taking care of someone in that kind of situation,” Semenyna said.

Canadian Blood Services (CBS), she said, played a massive role in getting her brother a bone marrow transplant, which is why it was important to her that they join her as a partner in her play’s debut.

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Jasmine Vallarta, business development manager at CBS, said it’s the first time the organization has ever partnered with a play. Vallarta said this was the perfect one to get behind at a time where almost 1,000 people across the country are waiting for stem cell donors.

At each show, CBS will be around if audience members are interested in being swabbed or learning more about donation.

“Fringe is a great opportunity to talk to different people that may not know about our organization or that we need blood donors or stem cell donors across the country,” she said.

The play, by both women’s accounts, is poignantly beautiful.

“I saw it on opening night … I actually teared up, and I really didn’t expect that, just because we’re in it every single day,” Vallarta said.

Semenyna said seeing her own work played out on the stage for the first time was “a little bit traumatic.”

“It was a lot of things that I had never said out loud and that I had kind of just carried with me for 18 years,” she said.

“Seeing it alive on stage … you can’t take it back.”

Still, she said the reactions from theatregoers who have come up afterwards to speak of their own experiences as cancer survivors or loved ones of those with cancer has been “rewarding, and incredibly humbling.”

The play runs for two more shows, one on Friday and the other on Sunday.

Tissues are recommended, Semenyna says.

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Brandon Lynch