Juliet Wittman is funny. You’d just never know it from her writing because she’s spent the past 25 years as a theater critic. And a British one, to boot! (A nicely placed rimshot right there would assure you that’s a little inside humor between two caustic ex-theater critics.)

But really … she is. Irascible and sharp of both tongue and typing fingers, she’s a witty, witty Wittman.

“Oh, I can be ironic. I can be sarcastic, but I’m not usually laugh-out-loud, take-out-all-the stops funny,” she countered last week. As the esteemed theater critic at Denver Westword for the final years when papers paid (and producers feared) professional critics, Wittman’s words were often the kind that stiffened both backs and upper lips. Because some people out there apparently think the theater is deadly serious business.

It’s not, of course. You know what is? Cancer. And no one knows that better than Wittman, who was diagnosed with breast cancer at 48. (For the record, that was 33 years ago.) She wrote a memoir about it called “Breast Cancer Journal: A Century of Petals” that won the Colorado Book Award and was named a finalist for the National Book Award.

“My daughter was only 10 at the time, and it all just seemed so terribly unfair,” said Wittman, who celebrated her 81st birthday last Monday. This Monday, she will be at the Tattered Cover Bookstore reading from her second fictive novel, “Again & Again,” a story that also takes place in “cancerland” (her word).

Now blessedly decades past her own cancer journey, Wittman can say with full authority that one’s feelings about mortality and death and illness do change as one ages. “You don’t get the feeling it’s unfair if you get cancer at 80 – because when you’re 80, it’s not,” she said with trademark candor.

I use that term “cancer journey” intentionally, because the sentimental ways we often describe people with cancer very much exasperate the journalist in Wittman. Phrases like, “So and so won (or lost) lost her battle with cancer.”

“I just hate those phrases,” said Wittman. “First of all, when you have cancer, it doesn’t feel like a war. And I certainly didn’t feel like a warrior. I also don’t like the outside world where it’s all ‘pink ribbons’ and an emphasis is on ‘ifs.’ Like, ‘If you’re a good person; if you unleash your creativity; if you eat lots of carrots; if you breathe right; if you do exercises; if you meditate, then you’ll win. You’ll beat cancer – which is all baloney. I know a lot of really miserable people who lived to be 90 with cancer – and I know a lot of amazingly creative and wonderful people who were not going to ‘beat’ cancer no matter how creative and wonderful they were. Because it is what is. It’s cancer.”

Wittman had a friend, Molly, who said to her once, “Dying is hard enough without having people tell you all the time, ‘It’s your own fault. If you’d only gotten more sleep, if only you’d eaten better.’ That kind of talk is very painful to hear. And it’s unfair because, as Americans, we like to think we have control. We like to think if we can just find the right doctor, he or she will save you. The message those people are sending is this: ‘You have to keep searching. And if you don’t, that’s your failure.’ But it’s not like that. I mean, c’mon: God doesn’t send you a memo.”

I told you she was funny.

Wittman would like to write a funny caper novel one day. But that day is not today. She released her well-received debut novel “Stocker’s Kitchen” in 2019 at the spry young age of 77. It’s about a vulgar, foul-mouthed cuisinier – “a cross between Gordon Ramsay and every other bad-tempered chef you’ve ever heard of,” she said – who falls in love with a young, half-Vietnamese woman.

“Again & Again” is the story of Chloe, a dying, 23-year-old woman Wittman describes as “pretty wild and crazy and messed-up and narcissistic and interesting and demanding.” Chloe is fighting hard against her terminal diagnosis, “because 23 is just wrong,” but she is truly galvanized when she meets a 4-year-old who has leukemia, and the insurance company is refusing to pay for a bone-marrow transplant.

“So Chloe decides, damn it, she’s going to raise the money. She’s not going to let this little boy die,” Wittman said. “So she embarks on this completely insane mission to raise a quarter of a million dollars.”

Yes, it’s a book about cancer. But it is also about women bonding together for a cause. It’s about all the issues of life and death and illness as they pertain to a child. And it’s a treatise on our broken health-care system, which is what “kind of jerks the plot into action,” she said.

“I think I’m writing about how people cope when they face matters of life and death, and maybe how vivid and alive people can become when they’re really mixed into it. And I think it’s about love.”

Wait a minute. Love? Where’s that coming from?

“Yeah, I told you it wasn’t going to be sentimental … but it is about that, too,” she confessed with a laugh.

Born amid the bombing

Wittman presents as fairly prim, proper and a stately 81. But she’s enjoyed a pretty wild ride over her lifetime. Her parents fled Czechoslovakia for England during World War II, and Wittman was born a refugee while bombs were dropping on London. Her proper bio lists her as an investigative reporter and critic with a passion for theater, literature, social justice and food, with fancy writing credits spanning the Boulder Daily Camera to The Washington Post. She was a longtime adjunct professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and has won more journalism awards than I have cat trees (which is a lot).

She started reviewing local theater for Westword the same week I did at The Denver Post – which turned out to be the week of 9/11. Her intellect and authoritative takes on local productions, along with her astute – shall we say “poppycock” meter – intimidated me. That is, until she took one of her reviews on a major right turn into an essay on her time as an idealistic young hippie living in an anti-war commune. That’s when I knew that if I ever got a chance to really meet her, I was going to like her – and I wasn’t wrong.

Wittman loved our local theater community, and no one could articulate that love as poetically as she could. But she could also lay the hammer down. (Just ask Gov. Jared Polis or Rep. Diana DeGette what that feels like whenever Wittman gets going on the topic of Palestinian sovereignty.)

For better or worse, I was the last full-time, salaried critic whose professional life was focused entirely on the local theater scene. And that’s already been over for 11 years. Wittman kept at it as a contributing writer at Westword right up to the pandemic shutdown. We both now hold on with a bit of rose-colored nostalgia to the long-gone days when the Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News, Westword and the Boulder Daily Camera supported dedicated theater critics – and every once in a great while, we all reached a magical, independent consensus over one special production or another. That’s when readers could really know that one out of dozens of concurrent stagings was, as they now say about just about everything, “not to be missed.”

Make no mistake: Being a responsible critic is a miserable existence. But much of that critical oxygen has been replaced by marketing and social media and well-intentioned boosterism. And while every theater community needs its cheerleaders, it also needs invested, respectful, paid critics who are willing to be misunderstood, disliked and even slandered for the greater good of honestly holding Colorado creatives to a high artistic bar. Readers and potential theatergoers deserve that, but it will never happen again. The new journalism economy will never allow for it.

“There is just a huge void now, and so people don’t know what to believe,” Wittman said. “I look at Facebook and I see people saying they saw this wonderful play or that – and I don’t believe a word of it because I know it’s not true.”

While Wittman misses the people and the plays, she’s actually rather enjoyed her return to cancerland over these past few years. She began writing “Again & Again” back when she was going through cancer herself. So revisiting it now as a present-day fictional story required her to fully delve back into cancerland like the real-life journalist she is – and she’s heartened by how much it has changed. As in, all of it.

“My very kind oncologist let me go on his rounds with him a few times. My surgeon even let me watch a couple of surgeries,” she said. “I went to support groups – and when people are sick and they know they’re not going to make it, you wouldn’t believe how they let loose. They cry, they laugh, they make jokes.”

Cancerland is “a world no one wants to visit,” she said. But, in the context of her book – and her singularly original protagonist – it is also a place of intense joy and vitality in the shadow of death.

“I think readers are absolutely going to love meeting Chloe,” Wittman said. “She’s an interesting character because she isn’t all good or all bad. I think you’re going to get really annoyed with her now and then – because she’s a brat. And I think they’re just going to love her because she’s so crazy brave. She likes a really nasty rocker with a lip ring, but she’s seductive – and she knows how to use it.

“And yes – I think she’s going to make you laugh.”