'BREAST' AUTHOR'S CANDOR STUNNING.

Byline: Elizabeth Rau Providence Journal

Susan Miller's one-woman show, "My Left Breast," has left her audience gasping.

One woman in Philadelphia wept through the performance.

A young man in Austin, Texas, told her simply: "You rocked."

And then there was the convert in Louisville, Ky.

"He had wandered into the wrong play and, as we opened, he thought, 'Oh, my God, I'm trapped,' " Miller recalled. "At the end, he said, 'I hope I'm trapped like this every time I get into the theater.' "

Miller's award-winning play about her struggle with breast cancer and a mastectomy has struck a responsive chord with hundreds of people throughout the country touched by her courage and honesty.

In the play, which will run Feb. 23-25 at the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, R.I., Miller also deals - often humorously - with the loss of her lesbian lover and the fear of leaving behind her son, only 8 when she was diagnosed with the illness.

"I am a one-breasted, menopausal, Jewish, bisexual lesbian mom, and I am the topic of our times," Miller writes, in one of the most frequently quoted lines in the play. "... I am a best seller. And I am coming soon to a theater near you."

Miller, who won an Obie and other playwriting awards for the play, was diagnosed with breast cancer at 35. The illness came as an even greater jolt because it had been misdiagnosed earlier by two doctors, including one who dismissed the lump in her breast as a cyst.

Fourteen years passed before Miller wrote about her experience.

"I had never written about breast cancer in all those years because, for me, I couldn't find a metaphor," said Miller, now 51, in a telephone interview from her home in New York. "I couldn't find a way to write about it in an entertaining way, in a poetic way."

Her breast cancer, she says, is a metaphor for other kinds of loss - the end of a 7-1/2-year relationship with her lover and her son growing up - and an invitation for others to look at life with humor and hope.