This week, 97.9 The Hill’s Aaron Keck welcomed a UNC professor who recently got on stage with a one-man show based on a very intense personal experience. Adam Versényi is a professor of dramaturgy, the former chair of UNC’s Department of Dramatic Arts, and the Senior Dramaturg for PlayMakers Repertory Company – so he’s very well versed in theater, to say the least. But last weekend he found himself under the lights, debuting his new show “An Empty Fullness: Meditations On Death and Life,” an account of his experience helping his 94-year-old mother Dinny prepare for a medically assisted death.
Versényi performed the show as part of UNC’s Process Series, directed by Process Series founder Joseph Megel.
Listen to their conversation. The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity.
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Aaron Keck: You did the show last weekend. What are your initial thoughts about that experience?
Adam Versényi: Just tremendously appreciative of the number of people that came to see it. This is something that has been gestating for a couple of years now, and it was a wonderful experience.
Keck: The piece started with a conversation you had with Joseph Megel, right?
Versényi: Yeah. My sister Andrea and I took our 94-year-old mother to Switzerland for medically-assisted death in April of 2024. And when I got back, I was relating the experience to a number of friends, one of whom was Joseph Megel…and after I got done, he said, ‘this should be a play.’
Keck: Never tell an interesting story to a theater producer if you don’t want to turn it into a performance.
Versényi: And Joseph and I have been working on it (ever since).
Keck: Tell us about your experience in 2024, going to Switzerland. That must have been so intense.
Versényi: This was something we had been discussing with my mother for about five years prior to our journey. She had decided at a certain point that this was what she wanted to do – although she was ambivalent about it and vacillated back and forth, right up until the end. We weren’t sure, in fact, if she was ultimately going to go through with it. So, you know, you have this desire to fulfill your mother’s wishes, and you think you’re doing everything possible to do what she wants to do – and yet she’s also resisting at the same time. And you’re making this international trip with a woman who can’t move terribly well. And then the journey in and of itself is exhausting. All of this stuff gets bound up, and you’re trying to negotiate things on a variety of different levels. And of course the end result is that you’re helping your mother die, which is both a beautiful thing and a very complicated thing simultaneously.
Keck: I keep thinking about what the plane rides must have been like. Those are long flights out and back.
Versényi: Yeah. We booked business class tickets to Frankfurt for my mom, we thought we were taking her out in style, and then our flight was delayed by three hours. When we finally got to Frankfurt, my mom’s response was, ‘I should never have come.’ And we had to move on (to Switzerland) beyond that. So it was a bit of a journey.
Adam Versényi’s mother Dinny. Photo via the UNC Process Series.
Keck: There’s laws underlying all of this too. There’s a reason you have to go out of North Carolina, out of the country.
Versényi: Yeah. We had looked into the possibility of doing this in the U.S. There are about a dozen states where it’s possible, but you have to be a citizen of that state…and usually (two or three) physicians have to sign off that the person is terminal. And my mom wasn’t terminal. She was just ready to die. In Switzerland, anyone 18 or older has the right to end their life.
Keck: (You went through) a two-year process of turning this into a performance… (and) Friday night last week, you stepped out on stage in front of a live audience to present this very personal story publicly for the first time. What was that process like for you? Was it what you expected? Was it cathartic? What did you feel as you were doing it? Walk us through that experience Friday night.
Versényi: It was wonderful. The impetus for talking about it to people when I got back was also the impetus for creating this show and sharing it with a broader audience. I think we have such an odd relationship to death in the U.S. And the whole purpose of the piece is to provide a space for conversation and consideration about these issues and how we approach death and what we conceive of it. Not only is death ultimately an essential part of life, but being able to give people options as to how they negotiate their own end-of-life experience, I think is incredibly important.
Keck: You can feel the audience reacting while you’re doing it. You can chat with the audience after it’s over. What about the audience reaction struck you the most? Surprised you the most?
Versényi: So we did two performances, and what was fascinating was how different the audience reaction was. Friday night was an older audience than Saturday, and there were a number of people in that audience who were actually advocates for end-of-life choices. So that was one discussion. Saturday night, people were largely younger and more interested in talking about story and character. So that in and of itself, you know, was quite interesting.
Keck: What’s next for this piece? Do you know yet?
Versényi: At the moment I’m just kind of drained by the whole experience, but I would love to be able to share this work with other audiences as well.
Featured photo by Aaron Keck/Chapel Hill Media Group.
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‘An Empty Fullness’: UNC’s Adam Versényi on Losing His Mother, and Reliving it on Stage Chapelboro.com.
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