My intention with this project is to explore what we consider access, what we consider equality and equity, and, ultimately, what we consider theatre. As a multiply marginalized stage focused actor, my career has remained largely stagnant although I’ve been at this over 30 years. I definitely had crises of self doubt and figured that I just ultimately wasn’t very talented or else I’d have gotten that “big break” and done better for myself by now, or maybe that I hadn’t worked hard enough or known well enough how to market myself. And, while every artist should absolutely self improve and continue to educate ourselves, in recent years I’ve come to confront the barriers I face that others simply don’t, and have been exploring ways to navigate those barriers in order to shape out a career and leave some kind of impact despite them.

With the advent of the pandemic a lot of interesting changes happened to the world at large. Outside the arts, disabled and homebound people found that there were suddenly options and opportunities available that hadn’t previously been acceptable when we’d suggested them for our own access needs, or where the technology had yet to catch up with what we were hoping to find. 2020 and 2021 were fully the busiest years of my career since moving to Chicago in 2014 and, quite possibly in my life. I was booking work with theatres and production companies in other states without needing to figure out if their spaces were accessible to me first. I was working on local productions where I know I was never cast because their spaces were definitely inaccessible. I was cast against type because I was only being a face and a voice, not a body in a space.

And then, it all stopped. And it still wasn’t (and isn’t) safe for everyone to be congregating indoors unmasked. So I diverted my energy into learning voiceover and narration and started working fairly exclusively there, and then also to finding virtual disabled artist community and seeing what was happening there.

My intent has never been to be a solo performer, but it’s something I’ve been relegated to because I didn’t get cast and couldn’t easily access other outlets. I’m a performer and a storyteller; I’m not a writer as such, or a content creator (I can do and have done those things but I get very little joy and fulfillment from them so I eschew the labels. I have no plans to go away and stop demanding inclusion). I’ve written and performed a half dozen solo shows in the hopes that I’d get “discovered” for my efforts, as that’s a path that has worked for some other artists. But I did do the work, and I had it, so I drew upon it to create what I have here, and morphed some of it into other mediums besides the original one.

I had two goals here: to bring in all the parts of me, all the ways in which I want to be creative that I love and make me happy but have had little opportunity to showcase, and to see how inclusive I could be while protecting my own access needs, in a show of cross-disability solidarity.

What I hope to model here is work where access isn’t about replicating one experience meant to be perceived a particular way for people who don’t perceive that way. It’s about taking the core ideas of the performance and presenting them for different access points, creating tailored experiences for audiences based on how they are accessing the performance. So there are things you can watch/listen to, but there are also things that you can just view, or just listen to, or just read, or just touch. You can join the performance live, or you can watch it later on your own time. And I do think that this is the future of live performance for both actors and audiences–meeting people where they are and tailoring the work to fit everyone involved.