Living life's lessons on stage

Hal Ackerman is featured as the UCLA.edu Spotlight with a story from UCLA Today, the university’s faculty and staff newspaper.

Veteran screenwriter Hal Ackerman has always advised his UCLA students to tap into their own experiences to find powerful stories.

For the last eight years, Ackerman, who co-leads UCLA’s screenwriting program in the School of Theater, Film and Television, has been living that lesson by making very public his fight to survive prostate cancer. He did it, first, in a lengthy column for AARP Magazine and then as a theater piece that he performed all over the country before groups of cancer survivors and doctors.

As a chronicle of his diagnosis in 1999 and treatment in 2000, his work – now a full-length play — stands alone in the way it combines pathos, humor, irony and finally insight that bubbled up when he confronted his own mortality – and the possible loss of his masculinity.

His tell-all play, “Testosterone: How Prostate Cancer Made a Man of Me,” may be, with luck, headed for an off-Broadway theater where Ackerman hopes to assemble the same production team that brought the work to the Powerhouse Theatre in Santa Monica a few months ago. It recently won the William Saroyan Society Centennial Drama Award.

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