Performer Dickie Hearts and performer/playwright Ryan J. Haddad in Dark Disabled Stories. Photo: Joan Marcus.

The last three pandemic years have at times felt like one giant social experiment, kicking away the premises of how we experience so many of life’s activities, from work to grocery shopping to travel to having a drink with a friend. The conventional premises of theater, pre-2020, held that it was a multisensory experience of presence—to engage with it as its creators intended, the audience needed to go to a specific room at a specific time, sit still in a specific seat, watch and listen and not make too much noise. The performers likewise needed to hear and speak and navigate environments both onstage and off. There were exceptions, sure–an individual performance that included a sign language interpreter or supertitles; a company like Deaf West Theatre or The Apothetae that engages with the disabled experience; a performer like Ali Stroker, who uses a wheelchair–but the basic paradigm remained (even when it led to Stroker’s not being able to access the stage from the audience when she won a Tony).  The pandemic launched a grand, not particularly willing experiment in ripping away one of those premises:  What does theater look like when we’re all in different rooms both making it and watching it? What do we gain, in terms of access; do we lose anything in return?

Dark Disabled Stories, written and performed by Ryan J. Haddad and coproduced by the Public Theater and the Bushwick Starr, digs in to some of those other premises: What is the theater experience if you can’t hear it or can’t see it? How do you create a radically accessible theater practice that holds space for blind and deaf audience, for Deaf and disabled actors? How do you tease apart those dimensions and put them back together into something that has a way in for everyone? But what do you have to throw away when you do that? What’s left? What kind of stories can you tell? 

Dark Disabled Stories is, as the title might predict, a storytelling piece and to a certain extent, it is your garden-variety autobiographical solo show: stripped-down production, unfussy direction by Jordan Fein, Haddad telling stories about his life with an acerbic edge that rides the boundary between standup and Spalding Gray. Some of the stories lean toward the risqué, and all of those are explicitly queer, but what makes the material ground-breaking is the smaller details of how Haddad navigates the world, from the complicated politics of the disabled seats on NYC buses to the difference between helpful and worse-than-not-having-any curb cuts to the most efficient way to balance grocery bags with a walker. But the show is also an investigation into modes of theatrical communication; at times it feels like a thought experiment as much as a theater piece. 

Each member of the three-person ensemble performs, for the great majority of the show, as Ryan and in relation to Ryan’s stories about his life: embarrassing dates and sexual encounters (often darkly funny); the challenges of navigating New York City, the MTA, and other New Yorkers as a disabled person (often maddening to listen to let alone to experience). Haddad himself has cerebral palsy and uses a walker; Dickie Hearts is Deaf, and plays Ryan in ASL (artistic sign language direction by Andrew Morrill) alongside Haddad’s voiced performance; and Alejandra Ospina, who uses a power wheelchair, plays a role similar to the Stage Manager in Our Town, guiding action by describing it, wryly, for the audience and also positioning herself in relation to it. Ospina and Hearts also bring nuance to Ryan. Not only is Haddad not interested in your pity, he sometimes seems to be actively flirting with your dislike—or at least, in some of the more nuanced stories, making it clear he isn’t any more deserving of your admiration than your pity. But where Haddad’s charm always has a little edge to it, Hearts’s performance is cheekier than Haddad’s, feels a little more buoyant and a little sweeter; Ospina brings a calm steadiness and a different, more fear-tinged sense of vulnerability. They help push the narrative away from standup and into something more dimensional.

Both the dialogue and Ospina’s descriptions are also projected, dialogue upstage with a certain visual flair (video design by Kameron Neal) and description in more traditional unadorned supertitles. So at any moment, the action and dialogue are simultaneously happening in at least two and as many as four different modes of communication. (Imagining such an approach used for a show with more characters, a more intricate narrative, or a more complex built environment grows dizzying quickly.) And as an exercise in attention, in how we experience a show coming at us in these multiple modes, it’s asking interesting questions: Am I taking in the same message or different ones when I read versus hear the line? Who am I watching when Alejandra is talking or when Ryan is talking and Dickie-as-Ryan signing? 

But asking the questions seems like only a beginning–much as the art of projection design grows by leaps and bounds as technology and experience allow designers to do more with the tools, I feel like there’s a further evolution to come, a more conscious approach in wielding the tools that grant accessibility to also shape attention, shape experience. Right now, experiment and art are both at the forefront, and sometimes the balance tips a little too much toward experiment; for example, there’s a word cloud segment near the end that felt like a clumsy and self-conscious attempt to spell out the themes.

For me, the piece approaches that evolution in the moments where it flips the script–where it allows Alejandra and Dickie to participate as storytellers in addition to aspects of Ryan; when Ryan’s voice is put in the service of voicing Dickie’s narrative as well as the other way around. Dickie’s story, of a Scruff date with a cop that almost went horribly wrong, is bravura and hilarious; Alejandra’s, of getting screwed over by the inability of the MTA to keep its elevators running, is quieter and more intimate. But both add a welcome expansion of the play world, and a welcome specificity that underscores the point that accessibility means something different to everyone, audience and performers alike, and perhaps we need not new paradigms, but an ever-expanding set of tools to customize each show to meet its precise needs.