Amsterdam performer Fer Rodil's darkly funny take on his harsh year facing cancer & loss

What happens when a professional storyteller is handed a narrative too painful to tell? That's the question Fernando Rodil, a screenwriter and director, was forced to confront over the last 12 months. After moving to Amsterdam from Buenos Aires to follow love, Rodil's life imploded when his close friend Marijn Maas, died from terminal cancer a few months before Rodil himself received a shocking cancer diagnosis. And then his five-year relationship came to an end.

Rodil speaks to the Dam Yankee podcast about how the sheer scale of the tragedy gave him an urgent, unexpected sense of purpose, driving him to create his new solo show, Fer Is On A Deadline, which will next be performed at the Storytelling Festival Nijmegen on Dec. 13. Expertly directed by Igor Alvarez Cugat, the show manages to be clever, introspective, thought provoking, and darkly funny.

For Rodil, a professional screenwriter accustomed to crafting scripts for HBO and Amazon Prime, the sudden confrontation with his own mortality forced a harsh pivot. Diagnosed with follicular lymphoma at age 35, he found comfort and resolve at the Amsterdam storytelling venue Mezrab, which he has called his "second home." He realized that structuring his trauma into a story would allow him to survive it.

He described the writing process as "exposure therapy," a way of "grabbing all these several sources of pain and turn them into something hopefully beautiful," he said. The diagnosis stripped away his previous identity, he told host Zack Newmark: "The most painful thing is the shift, the moment of transition in which you still want to understand yourself as your previous self as someone that is perfectly healthy... and realizing, 'No, you have to let that Fernando go. Now you are this Fernando the cancer patient.'"

This loss of self was compounded by the death of his close friend, Marijn Maas, at age 32. Rodil struggled to find logic in the tragedy. "There's nothing more meaningless, no clearer evidence of meaninglessness, than a cancer diagnosis when you're young," he said. Yet, Marijn’s approach to his final days became a guiding light for Rodil’s own journey. "The fact that I saw him walking us through the process of his dying throughout his last year and seeing him happy also, that was incredible," Rodil noted.

Despite the heavy subject matter, Fer Is On A Deadline is a comedy. Rodil recalled crucial feedback from Farnoosh Farnia at Mezrab's House of Creation that helped him shape the show past his raw grief: "She told me, 'Think of what you want the show to look like in two years.'"

This tip helped him edit out bitterness and anger. He concluded that his ultimate resolve is acceptance. "If I didn't go through all these things, I wouldn't have known that I could go through these things and still be happy," he said. "I think I still need to make plans because I'm not dead yet," he finished. "So, I want to achieve stuff, and achieving stuff requires some planning."

Listen to the full interview with Fernando Rodil on the Dam Yankee podcast on all major platforms, or watch the video on YouTube. For more information on Rodil's show and workshops, visit his Instagram account, and the websites for Mezrab and the House of Creation. Tickets for the Storytelling Festival Nijmegen cost 15 to 20 euros in advance, or 25 euros at the door on Dec. 13.

 

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