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. As a teen, he was practically obsessed with death, feelings which resurfaced after he was diagnosed with follicular lymphoma at the age of 35. But he felt comfort and found resolve at the Amsterdam storytelling venue Mezrab, which he has called his "second home" in recent years. It was there that 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 urgency was real; the diagnosis stripped away his previous identity, he told Dam Yankee 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 death hasn't touched them, 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, a tragedy that Rodil finds difficult to explain. "There's nothing more meaningless, no clearer evidence of meaninglessness, than a cancer diagnosis when you're young," Rodil said. "Like the fact that my friend. Marijn. died at 32, there's no reason for it and there's no possible reason for it." 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. It was his friend's ability to stay so positive, and drawing people in even towards the end, that showed Rodil how he can continue to keep pressing forward no matter what life throws at him.

Despite the heavy subject matter, Fer Is On A Deadline is very much a comedy. Rodil refused to create a show that wallowed in misery, and a piece of early feedback was crucial. His initial version had more focus on his relationship falling apart, and was far more raw. "So all of those things were a source of lot of pain, a lot of bitterness," which then came out on paper. "Like the first versions of the show were quite bitter, especially the breakup parts. Incredibly bitter. There's a lot of anger. There's still a lot of anger in me about it," he continued.

It was Farnoosh Farnia, at Mezrab's House of Creation, that helped guide Rodil past that. "She told me, 'Think of what you want the show to look like in two years,'" Rodil recalled. "So that really kind of like gave me a very potent tool to edit stuff out. I'm pretty sure this is just my anger of right now. I'm pretty sure in two years, I'm not gonna be."

In one candid moment during the show's tryout on stage last month, a slip of the tongue revealed his raw feelings about his ex's career success. "I said, 'She's a very successful comedian, and also talented,' but then I realized I needed to say 'successful' at the end, and then it came out as, 'She's very successful, and also talented, but mostly successful,'" he laughed. "That was a thing that just fell out of my mouth."

And at the end of the day, Rodil knows that his life, however long or short, will always be made up of uncertainty. That does not mean he has to shut down. "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 told Dam Yankee. While he acknowledges the fear of death resurfaced, he remains focused on living. "I think I still need to make plans because I'm not dead yet," he said. "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.