San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
ROAD TRIP THROUGH TIME
Powered by disabled artists, ‘Emily Driver’s Great Race Through Time and Space’ is a traveling show that revisits key moments in the fight for disability rights
Acherry-red Ford Mustang charges across continents and leaves decades in the dust in “Emily Driver’s Great Race Through Time and Space,” the latest La Jolla Playhouse POP Tour show for area schoolkids. Then, this highway beast gets folded up and packed away in a van with the rest of the set from the traveling, Playhouse-commissioned piece about a girl in a wheelchair who embarks on a fight for equal rights.
It’s a neat feat, and the spirit of ingenuity that produced it is bound up inextricably with the mission of National Disability Theatre, the Playhouse’s partner on the POP Tour work.
Confronted with the puzzle of how to create a credible version of a Mustang that could both roll across a stage and be easily carted from school to school, the “Emily Driver” team hit on the idea of connecting a pair of wheelchairs and mounting a sporty grill on the front — complete with a disabledparking placard.
It was a solution that those who don’t have much experience with wheelchairs might have overlooked. That wasn’t a problem for this production, though, because “Emily Driver” has what might be — for a
major regional theater, anyway — an unprecedented percentage of artists with disabilities on its creative team and cast.
Mickey Rowe and Talleri A. Mcrae, the co-founders of NDT and current Playhouse artists in residence, like to use the term “disability gain” — the idea that engaging with the world differently, whether as a wheelchair user or a deaf person or someone on the autism spectrum, brings advantages instead of simply (as the world often views it) deficits and difficulties.
(The term is borrowed from the concept of “deaf gain,” one of numerous inspirations and ideas NDT has received from the deaf community.)
And the two, who are co-directing “Emily Driver,” point to the car in the play as a prime example.
“I think to be perfectly honest, and very reasonably, a lot of people at La Jolla Playhouse in production were a little nervous early on about about a having a Ford Mustang go on tour,” says Rowe, who in 2017 became the the first autistic actor to play the lead role in the Tony Award-winning play “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.”
“But part of disability gain is that when you already have actors who use wheelchairs, you already have a car, and really all you need to add is a couple of headlights. That’s one of the ways where our show is more dynamic, and really more creative. We’re able to do things that we otherwise wouldn’t be able to do, because of actors who have a disability.”
In that spirit, NDT and the Playhouse team seem to be doing something quietly revolutionary with “Emily Driver,” which tours San Diego County schools through late March and has public performances at the Playhouse on Feb. 29 and March 1.
Even in theater, which in some respects has led the way in the entertainment world when it comes to equity, diversity and inclusion, “disability is just a little bit behind where some other groups are,” Rowe says.
“Right now, what happens in professional theater is a theater company wants to be inclusive and accessible toward disability. So they’ll have a play written by a non-disabled writer, directed by a non-disabled director, with an almost totally non-disabled cast.
“But there will be one actor with a disability in the show. And everyone applauds and cheers and it is an astounding success. And the fact of the matter is that 20 percent of the population of the United States, according to the census, has a disability.
“So while we feel it is so great and wonderful that people are now finding ways to include one person with a disability in a show every so often, and that it’s being celebrated, both National Disability Theatre and La Jolla Playhouse have really said, ‘That’s not quite enough.’
“And (have said) that representation is important not only onstage, but also in terms of the artists who are designing all of the work.” (With “Emily Driver,” those artists include Sean Fanning, the pre-eminent San Diego set designer, who identifies as deaf/hard of hearing.)
“A lot of accessibility and disability culture is problemsolving on your feet and being adaptable,” Rowe adds. “And that is something the Playhouse is already so used to doing because of their work with new plays. It really makes them such a perfect fit for working around disability and that kind of creative problemsolving.”
On a roll
“Emily Driver’s Great Race Through Time and Space,” written by A.A. Brenner and Gregg Mozgala, begins with a predicament familiar to many people with disabilities: a struggle to get appropriate services.
In this case, teenage Emily (Cass Pfann) — who hosts a Youtube channel called “Adventures in History” — is denied funding for a new wheelchair to replace her crutches.
Soon, though, the play shifts into fantasy overdrive, as Emily is spirited away in the Mustang for a trek through key moments in the fight for disability rights.
In the words of the actor Jaye Wilson, who drives the car and plays two key characters in the piece: “These wheels right here will take us anywhere.” (The cast also includes Paúl Araújo and Farah Dinga.)
Although NDT is barely a year old, it has already made waves on the national theater scene, and the founders’ Playhouse residency is its most high-profile project yet. Besides the POP Tour piece, the company’s collaboration with the La Jolla theater also includes a cocommission (with Chicago’s Goodman Theatre) of a new piece from Christopher Shinn, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for “Dying City.”
Part of the company’s aim is to help the theater world move away from what Mcrae bluntly calls “inspiration porn.”
“What that means is the idea that the purpose of the story is to inspire and make people without disabilities feel good about themselves,” explains Mcrae, an actorturned-director who has cerebral palsy. “It’s not actually a story about the lived experience of a person with a disability; its sole purpose is to make other people feel good.
“And typically, if it’s really, really bad, it’s supposed to make you feel good that you don’t have a disability yourself, right? Like, ‘Oh, I’m so grateful that that is not my life.’
“Whereas if you flip it, and you say we’re living in a culture of disability gain, then we’re going to find a way to celebrate ourselves and lift up what is awesome about what we can do — not because we have quoteunquote ‘overcome all of these things,’ but because we’re creative, because we’re smart, because we’re adaptable.”
Adds Rowe: “I think the other thing that leads to in this show is a lot of humor. People without disabilities are sometimes a little hesitant to laugh at difference — which is so understandable and acceptable, of course. But because we are a company of people with disabilities, we do get to laugh about disability, and share that laughter with an audience in a way that’s OK.”
As he chats during a rehearsal break, Rowe is wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Kiss my Asperger’s.” Mcrae, sitting beside him, jokes: “I was supposed to wear my ‘I’m just in it for the parking’ shirt.”
Mcrae is very serious, though, about what it has meant to be a part of this show, which she says takes in “an overwhelming number of artists who either identify as disabled or ‘it’s complicated.’ ” (The company gives anyone interested in working with the company the option of answering a question about their disability identity.)
“I had a really, really emotional week when we were workshopping this play,” Mcrae says of how the experience compared to her previous work in theater productions, where she might’ve been the only person with a disability.
Often, there was “this self-consciousness that sets in. You think, I wonder who’s noticing for the first time that this is how I move? I wonder if people are worried. I wonder if the choreographer’s nervous.
“It wasn’t even until we were in that room (for “Emily Driver”), and Mickey said, ‘All right, let’s start moving around,’ that I thought: ‘Oh my gosh, I’m not the only one limping. Nobody’s watching me because we’re watching everybody move in the way that they move.
“And it was just so freeing, in a way that I never experienced before. There was nothing to apologize for. There was nothing to make up for.
“That’s never been my experience in my whole life.”
For information about booking the POP Tour show for a school performance, contact Hannah Reinert, hreinert@ljp.org. For more information on the Adopt-a-school program, contact Cristina Hernandez, chernandez@ljp.org.
“A lot of accessibility and disability culture is problem-solving on your feet and being adaptable. And that is something the Playhouse is already so used to doing because of their work with new plays. It really makes them such a perfect fit for working around disability and that kind of creative problem-solving.”
Mickey Rowe, co-founder of National Disability Theatre