Never Walked In High Heels

My assistant carries my duffel bag to the stage door and stops. My body, covered with baby oil to simulate sweat, takes its last calm breath before mayhem begins. After I knock on the door, I won’t be able to go at my pace, my speed until we make our final bow in exactly eighty four minutes. Until then I will be moving at performance pace, performance speed, trying frantically to make jokes and complex ideas understood, keeping the audience’s energy up, all while making every stylized move seem natural. This is the job of a performer. This is the job I always wanted. I raise my hand to knock  on the door. My sister in the play opens is and looks appalled, just  like the director intended. I barge onto the stage in my wheelchair.

Instantly and, it seems, undetectable to a great many people, I feel the audience clench up.  It’s not me, I’ve been in enough performances to know what nerves are and how to adjust to them. This isn’t me, its them. Even in our modern age it seems we are still living in a world where as soon as a professional actor with a disability comes onto the stage, the audience becomes nervous, as if they are expecting to watch a train wreck in slow motion. Its  the threat of live performance and part of what makes theatre so addictive. Although we don’t want them to, the idea that action on stage is happening in real time and that performers might drop the ball puts us at the very edge of our seats. We like this risk, to a certain extent.

Unless you put a performer like me onstage. Trained by professionals myself, my performance style is unique at best. My speech is of a slightly different cadence, my movements aren’t always fluid. But my intentions are precise, my ideas clear and innovative, and my stories are, for the most bit, entertaining. And yet each time I go onstage I feel the wave of nerves from an audience wondering if they are about to witness a train wreck. Can she remember her lines? What did she just say?  How long is  she going to be  onstage? Who cast her in the first place and why  didn’t they get a proper actor?

Before you protest and say it’s nerves getting the better of me, I have a confession to make. In marketing my shows disability is never mentioned. My plays really aren’t about disability as it just isn’t a topic which interests me. Leave ghettoized theatre to quota seekers and box tickers. I write the story of human beings which I can play for two reasons. First, I am honestly bored. No one else is casting me in work and many of the companies who aim to do otherwise don’t write interesting characters with disabilities. By accomplishing both I am creating a sound body of work for myself. Contrary to all rumors, this is a top priority for any artist. One must  create work which excites you, if you ever want to have a shot at exciting anyone else. Secondly, my plays are about the human condition. Disability is meant to be a metaphor which allows the audience to lock into a character, not an implacable monolith of a topic. As such, I don’t advertise my plays as being disability art any more than  Whitman saw his poetry to be about homosexuality. Art is a reflection of the human condition which is universal, provided of course, we don’t foolishly become too bogged down by the specifics.

So in a way I’m asking for trouble. I don’t warn potential audience members of a major characteristic of the piece, one which, in fact, might make a number of people very uncomfortable. To my knowledge there is no disability advisory warning or any plot spoilers required for theatrical advertising. Anybody should be able to come on stage in the course of an evening and, so long as their acting abilities hold up, the audience should accept they belong in that story. And throughout western theatre history, the range of acceptable actors has grown to include multiple genders, ethnicities, ages, and a host of other factors. Actors with disabilities should stay in disability theatre it seems. Outside of myself, they are  rarely seen in the West End. And with an audience reaction like what I’ve witnessed, who can blame the producers for not casting people with disabilities. A nervous audience is rarely a paying audience.

While onstage, there is little I can do to ease audience tension except play me role well which, admittedly, is easier some nights than others. I am tied to a script, my hands bound to certain actions at certain times. As much as I would like to call the audience out and say ‘trust me would ya,’ it can’t happen. I am told by friends that after a few minutes the tension dies down and the audience begins to feel more at ease. If this happens I can’t tell when it occurs. By that time I’m so far in the story I’ve forgotten about the audience’s existence. I have taken note of the tension but refused to take it on. I know my work is good and the audience can’t walk out. The door is shut, the lights are low, and for the next hour and a half they have to deal with the surprise of having an actor with a disability on stage.  If that’s such a shocking idea, then I don’t care what the reviews say, the fact the piece exists is enough.

What more could any artist ask for?

“Does the part where they sing still move you every time, Dad? Even at your age?” We were in my flat, each sprawled out on one of my couches, watching Casablanca for the fourth time that day. My father was fiddling with his camera, trying to figure out something about the exposure. He had been taking a Hollywood photography class that autumn and as a result had to watch all sorts of old black and whites.

“Yes,” he said, his answer brief and definitive as if he didn’t even think about it. “You know they say when this bit was filmed, there wasn’t a dry eye on set. Most of the actors were European refugees.”

The first time my father sat me down to watch Casablanca I was six. The only thing I remember about it are the animated maps at the beginning, and the airplane flying, which, to my eyes even back then, looked like a plastic toy. But it was my father’s favorite movie and every few months we would sit down to watch it.  I knew it was a good movie. But in those early years of my life I couldn’t understand why.

In art, the pieces which force us to sick with them are considered to be the classics. They force us to grow into an understanding of them and their time, rather than being tailor  made to be a piece which fits our own surface skimming view of the world. We keep coming back to films such as Casablanca or books such as Moby Dick, because despite all our growth and advancement both in civilization and on the individual  level, classic pieces keep asking us the same questions which seem to have no finite answers. What is a hero? What is a man? What is right?

My father chose to expose his six year old to such questions in the form of old movies and thick books, the King James Bible and existential poetry, not in the hope that I would be able to answer such questions correctly. He knew that the mind of a child, while curious, is not actually wiser than anyone else’s mind. Rather my father wished me to be unafraid of asking such questions, referring to the same sources over and over, and realizing that finding an answer is about as difficult as nailing jello to a wall.

It wasn’t until I went away to college twelve years after seeing Casablanca for the first time, that the film finally started to click into place. It took another three years for me to actually like it. There are some parts such as the singing of the national anthem which always spoke to me, even when I was very much unaware of what the film was about. But there are new details which I notice as small bursts of realization with every new viewing. He has his hands on the papers now and doesn’t even know it… Oh that’s what why he’s wearing a fez… This whole thing is just an extended metaphor about neutrality in a war. 

Now that I’m a working artist myself, I look at piece which are worth revisiting with a new set of eyes.  To be able to have the audience return again and  again, each time getting something new out of the work is an ambition I seek to accomplish whenever I sit down with a new piece. A philosopher friend once told me that the same person can never read the same book twice, meaning that art changes you so that the person who opens the book is never the same man who closes it. I have learned however, that even the most well established writers and artist cannot knowingly create a piece in which layers are able  to be explored endlessly. The artistic muse is not a short order cook or city planner. The best blueprint any of us can follow, either while sitting with  pen and paper or in a Twentieth Century Fox studio is the truth. The world as we each see it, with all its questions and requests for humility, is still the most interesting subject requiring all of us to even begin to make it functional. An artist can require little else from his audience.

Casablanca hasn’t changed at all over the years. But I have. Unlike a play, the performance and cadence of the story doesn’t alter even if I sit down to watch it night after night. But the piece changes me, making it impossible not to get goose bumps at parts which I know are coming and can recite word for word. These are the actions and lines that have touched me before and, knowing the new lessons my  brian jumps at the opportunities to build on them again. These are the parts that inspire me, even while lying on the couch during a Sunday off.

Because, in the end, what Laszlo says about the fictitious reports of his death is the greatest complement an artist can receive…  “it was true every single time.”