In “Night Side Songs,” the American Repertory Theater’s latest commission, audience participation is key.

The “communal music-theater experience,” as it’s called, is directed by Taibi Magar and is performed not only for, but with, the audience. Written by brothers Daniel and Patrick Lazour, the play explores a young woman’s cancer diagnosis and the way it affects her community.

By including the audience in its songs, “Night Side Songs” seeks to create a space for having a “collective healing experience,” said A.R.T. artistic director Diane Paulus in her welcome.

It’s a touring show in its weekend at the Cambridge performances are on at the Masonic Temple; stating April 9, the show is at Hibernian Hall in Roxbury.

The play centers around Yasmine (Brooke Ishibashi), a young woman diagnosed with cancer. The rest of the ensemble play doctors, family members and lovers. Yasmine’s story is interspersed with three visions, each looking at cancer at a different times. There’s one set in the 1200s, when a suggestive British innkeeper named Prudence (Mary Testa) feels a lump in her breast, another in the 1960s, as doctors are developing chemotherapy and a third in the future about a songwriter named Harris (Jordan Dobson) who refuses treatment and writes his own obituary before he dies.