MARINE CITY, Mich.–If there is a downside to living a successful and comfortable life, it is that it becomes easy to overlook the small, but important, lessons of life. “Don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone,” is a real danger for many who enjoy a relatively stable existence in a relatively stable society, because sometimes it takes a tragedy to make you wake up and realize something remarkable. If there’s a bright side, it’s that occasionally you can learn that lesson without full blown tragedy—maybe all it takes is a temporary crisis.

What Doesn’t Kill You offers up a tale of such a life lesson born of crisis. Two award winning Broadway, TV and film veterans, playwright James Hindman and director Christian Borle, bring this comedic yet meaningful one-man show to The Snug Theatre in Marine City. Hindman plays himself in a show that’s presented as autobiographical; it’s difficult to tell what amount of the story, if any, is fictional. That’s a good thing, because it feels 100% true, and that gives the message even more impact.

Hindman, a native of metro Detroit, begins immediately by starting a casual conversation with the audience, sharing his “prop” snacks and showing off vacation photos from his cell phone. In fact, the entire show plays out like a conversation, punctuated with clever off-script moments, and Hindman makes some genuine connections with the audience which he keeps alive throughout the show. After revealing something of an obsession with Cher that dates back to his younger years, he begins relating an experience many, unfortunately, can relate to: an unexpected heart attack. Hindman turns the old joke “Are you serious?” “As a heart attack!” upside down as he walks the audience through the initial alarm to the drudgery of hospital routines to some mildly alarming hospital mix-ups. He uses humorous situations and asides with just the right pacing to keep the story from taking itself too seriously. It’s hard to imagine laughing about a heart attack, but laugh we did.

Woven throughout the story of the health crisis is the memoir of a European vacation with his significant other, and the impulsive decision to tour a concentration camp. Isn’t this supposed to be a comedy? How do you keep it funny when describing a concentration camp? Hindman skillfully interweaves many lighthearted moments into the tale, yet fully conveys the impact of that tour. In fact, he is inspired after the trip to do more in-depth research on the camp, and ultimately makes something of a connection across time with a prisoner he learns about in his research. He takes to heart some of the lessons he learns from her story, which also sheds new light on an old disappointment he has pushed down his own Orwellian memory hole.

As moved as Hindman is with the experience of the concentration camp prisoner, he is unable to make it apply to his own life until he suffers the crisis of the heart attack. A particularly vociferous nurse (who he wishes he could tune out) takes advantage of her captive audience (a.k.a. cardiac patient) and relates her own past medical crisis to Hindman; in so she doing gives him a nugget of wisdom that comes to be the silver lining in the entire crisis. The nugget becomes an epiphany when he connects it with the lessons of the concentration camp, and it gives him the extra nudge he needs to take risks he was previously unwilling to take, resulting in some truly life-changing decisions.

Excitement pours out of Hindman as he shows off his formerly repressed but newly rediscovered talents in one of the most humorous portions of the show, a hilarious monologue that is a bit predictable in its destination, but an absolute joy during the rid

As Hindman relates the personal and career successes he has enjoyed as a result of putting his newfound wisdom into practice, these things becomes clear: Hindman has many more stories to tell, and making lemons into lemonade can be life changing—and really, really funny.

What Doesn’t Kill You is playing at The Snug through June 24, 2018.