Talk about life-and-death drama—or comedy, depending on what your take is. To mark his 30th birthday in 2010, Richard Tyrone Jones was busy presenting his own mock funeral on-stage—as his heart was going into critical failure.

“My friends did poems about death and generally slagged me off—all while I was lying in a coffin for three hours, not actually realizing I was dying,” the British spoken-word artist tells the Straight, speaking over the phone from the Victoria Fringe Festival, where he’s performing the solo show Richard Tyrone Jones’s Big Heart before bringing it to Vancouver. “When you reach 30 that’s pretty much the end of your life anyway, but I didn’t realize it would be such a turning point.” A few weeks later, he would be in emergency surgery to save his life.

There is nothing quite like exposing your most traumatic medical moments on-stage, alone in a spotlight—not to mention finding a bit of humour in the crisis. It’s something visitors to the Vancouver Fringe Festival will get to see in two different shows this year. While the critically lauded Jones, a formerly healthy, cycling Cambridge grad, takes us into the operating room and back, locally born solo actor Rebecca Steele bares the pain of having to wear a back brace during her most vulnerable teen years.

It’s one thing to join an actor on a trip back into a horrific health crisis; it’s quite another for the performer him- or herself, who must relive the agony every night. In Jones’s case, his current tour on the Fringe and festival circuit means “dying” in front of an audience sometimes every night of the week. “My heart-stopping four minutes on-stage was the most terrifying thing that’s ever happened to me and now I do it again and again,” he says with a dry laugh.

What initially got Jones through his trauma was writing, first in poetry and blogs that he eventually put together into a show, once he got well enough. A master wordsmith, he finds the rhythm in the medical terminology he had to learn about his condition, even putting together a lengthy sequence where he lists genetic disorders: “It’s a massive, long tongue twister that took me weeks to learn, and now that I’ve learned it I can’t get it out of my head,” Jones says.

Any science you hear in his solo show, in fact, was vetted by cardiac specialists. “So it is a peer-reviewed show,” he quips.

For Rebecca Steele, developing her show Braced has also helped her deal with a medical trauma in her past—but one that left more emotional scars than physical. As a teen in North Delta, she had to wear a moulded-plastic back brace to treat her scoliosis (severe curvature of the spine) through puberty, and it always haunted her. It was bound to her body 23 hours a day for two-and-a-half years, and had to be worn at night for more than 12 months after that. Writing a play about the experience was an equally long process.

“The show took about four years just to develop it—I’d start to write it then put it on the back burner and then I’d come back to it,” Steele tells the Straight over the phone from Brooklyn, where she moved from Vancouver to study at the acclaimed Circle in the Square Theatre School. Until she started writing the piece, she says, she had never told anyone about the experience. “I guess I felt I was very victimized at the time when I was young and I was angry about it. But it’s important to look back at your past, and important to be able to laugh at your past as well.

“There are so many times in life when I feel I have an insecurity about something and I feel 13 again and in a back brace.”

As Steele developed the piece, she gradually took on the roles of more than a dozen different characters—not something she had expected. She also found that, unlike Jones, she had to distance herself slightly from the sometimes difficult story.

“I’ve noticed that in some solo shows the actor uses their own name, but for me it was really important to separate myself from the character Lauren, who’s 13 and suffers scoliosis. And also I changed all the names of the people, as well. So it was a fine line: I felt like I would pour everything out on the page, and I had to shift it a bit from what happened,” she says, then adds: “It’s maybe 75 percent true.”

Since then, Steele has premiered the piece at a festival in New York, toured it to high schools, and also shown it to a girls’ support group called Curvy Girls, an audience of teens with scoliosis that would be her work’s true testing ground. “That was an incredible experience, seeing these young girls and their moms—I could feel and hear them sobbing. They were connected right there with me,” she says.

It was with some difficulty that Steele decided, early on, that she needed to wear an actual back brace like the one she once had—and long ago discarded—for her show. Putting it on for the first time was deeply emotional. But it has physical challenges too: she has to watch how long she wears it. “I have to be careful because it’s made to adjust,” she explains. “There are pads that put different pressure on different parts—I have to take breaks during the process.”

Yes, medically motivated theatre carries its own risks. And in Jones’s case, as you might expect, they’re pretty serious. In his show, he talks about becoming a “cyborg” with a defibrillator, or what he calls a “backup heart”, installed to kick-start him if anything should go wrong.

“If I get overheated on-stage and my heart reaches 250 beats per minute, there’s a chance I might get defibrillated live on-stage—it has happened three times, when I haven’t been on-stage, and it’s like being kicked in the chest by a magical little pony,” he says, before adding mock-cheerily as he heads off for a performance: “The show must go on, though!”