Joan Lipkin, the director of the DisAbility Project gives a massage to Ana Jennings before a rehearsal at Washington University's Occupational Therapy building, at 4444 Forest Park Avenue. (Jamie Rector)

Theater group gives disabled actors a stage and a voice

By Lorraine Kee
Of The Post-Dispatch
Sunday, Sept. 3, 2000

The DisAbility Project also works with nondisabled actors, but its main goal is to let able-bodied people know that people with disabilities really aren't that much different.

Somewhere along the journey from obscurity to simmering celebrity -- after director Joan Lipkin's mind first lit on the idea for the DisAbility Project four years ago, but well before the theatre company landed for the first time on an honest-to-goodness stage this spring -- the Sharing Circle evolved. Early on, the circle was meant as an icebreaker before rehearsal got rolling. Everybody was new then and, after introductions, Lipkin usually asked newcomers to the company to say a little something about themselves, which amounted to little more than their names.

Now, with an established ensemble, The Sharing Circle is support group and creative incubator. The actors' attachment to the project and to each other is fixed as much by the chairs they pull in a circle before rehearsal as by the communal mission they share.

The DisAbility Project is a theater ensemble of disabled and nondisabled actors. In a society that once cast people with disabilities as destined for a lifetime of institutionalization -- or even sterilization -- the project gives people with disabilities a voice.

Onstage, the company seeks to create art that is interesting and fresh. The project asks its actors to reinvent themselves, just as people with disabilities do in a world weighted in favor of those without disabilities.

But here, art intersects with reality. The theater ensemble is about change, as in changing perceptions about people with disabilities. They want audiences to applaud them for what they can do rather than what they can't. They want to be seen the way they see themselves.

As differently abled.

And they want society's fittest to see that people with disabilities are not so different. Disability can happen any day to anybody through accident, age or ancestry.

Within their circle on one Saturday in May, Edith Ritterband breaks the ice by informing the group she has taken her exam to become a paramedic.

Ritterband, the company's community outreach coordinator, left Memphis, Tenn., on a Greyhound bus for St. Louis at 5 a.m. so she could make rehearsal.

"If I'm tired, I have a better excuse than all of you," she says, teasingly. "At Edith's suggestion I went to a Jewish singles speed-dating thing," says Stuart Falk, with a nasal, self-deprecating delivery similar to that of comedian Richard Lewis.

"There were eight women and eight men. The women stayed put and the men rotated from table to table. We only had about eight minutes with each other. So then we had to go home and wait expectantly, while we found out who we matched with. I matched with three women.

"Three out of eight. Not bad for a guy in a chair."

Dating is hard enough. But at 38, Falk has been married twice, divorced twice. Empathetic smiles blossom around the circle.

"I spoke with one of them," he continues. "She was kind of tops on my list and I'm thinking, 'I hope she does call. I hope she does.' So she did. And we have a tentative date Monday night."

He grits his teeth and wipes imaginary sweat from his brow. The smiles around the circle turn hopeful.

"I'll keep you posted."

Anybody else? Lipkin asks.

"I'm sorry I missed last week," Katie Rodriguez begins. "I tried on my dress. I've got six more days as a single woman."

"I bet you look just like Julia Roberts," Rich Scharf says.

Need more teeth for that, says Rodriguez, 35, who has a well-deserved reputation for being perpetually perky and very well-organized. She is often the first to arrive for rehearsal.

"I've planned this so well I think I can actually enjoy the event," she announces to a smattering of applause.

In a week, Rodriguez will marry. Not bad for a woman on wheels.

Actors and advocates

The Sharing Circle helps them shed the shrouds of their self-consciousness for the comfortable cloak of trust. "People can take real artistic risks when they know each other and are committed to a project greater than themselves," Lipkin says.

The Sharing Circle connects them, but it also provides inspiration for their performance pieces. There's not exactly a whole body of theater work out there for disabled actors or, for that matter, on the subject of disability. So they draw from personal experience.

Lipkin, whose edgy work with That Uppity Theatre Company has been acclaimed here and abroad, has long written about those who know the pleasure and pain of being different.

Project pieces "Parking," "Coffeehouse" and "Attendant Care -- What a Scare" speak directly to disability issues. Falk delivers "Club Med" -- the name alludes to medicine, not a posh resort -- with the battle-hardened humor of a veteran of many hospital stays.

Jim Tuscher's astonishment at seeing a televangelist's showy production inspired the satirical "Healing Ministries." Another piece is universal: the unleashed oppression of a doctor's waiting room. They're choreographing a number to the Prince song "Kiss."

Two pieces show the personal side of disability: One is a reflection on growing up with asthma and another is about a quadriplegic's first sexual experience since her car accident.

Everyone works within his or her range of motions. In the piece on asthma, Rodriguez thumps her chest playing asthmatic Marcia LaCour-Little's heart and Colleen Gilmore and Nick Kalfas fan their arms as Marcia's imaginary lungs. In a mirroring exercise, they begin a pretend day, regardless of ability, by washing faces. They brush their teeth, their hair. All the pieces are tweaked and picked apart till they are acted to some elusive perfection, with actors learning more than one part in case someone isn't able to be there. Lipkin can't tell you when the pieces reach that perfect pitch where they are fresh, thoughtful and sometimes irreverent -- but never preachy. She likes the way a friend once described the sound of a club head's sweet spot striking a golf ball. Ping! It's like that.

The players always wind up a performance on the same note.

"We are of you," they say in unison. "We are among you. We are you. Do not be afraid."

Building blocks

The Sharing Circle segues into breathing exercises and shoulder massages by Lipkin. The lights go down, the music up. The troupe tunes out the rest of the world.

Stretching and warm-ups are over. Lipkin wants to try a piece new to many of them. She calls it "Waking in the Forest." Explore the possibility of movement and the world around you, she directs them.

Think of yourselves, she says, as single cell organisms. On that most basic biological level, they are equals.

What's my motivation?

The theater ensemble was Lipkin's idea.

Her ideas evolve with the complexity of the atmospheric conditions -- clashing fronts, cumulus clouds and electrical currents -- that converge to produce lightning.

Personal trauma does not make one compassionate, Lipkin insists. But she endured her share of trauma growing up. She grew up in a middle-class, progressive, ethnically diverse neighborhood on Chicago's south side. Her parents, Evelyn and Stanley Lipkin, say their daughter was an intellectually curious, shy and "not physically strong" child. They don't remember her without a pen and a piece of paper in her hand. She spun a fourth-grade assignment on state capitols into a play.

At age 7, a neighbor's dog attacked her. When she returned to school, the other kids taunted her. The scar is still visible, running from her right temple down to her cheek.

"I think she realized that there's potential for aggressiveness and violence in the world," her mother says.

Lipkin once marched home after school and demanded to know what her parents had done to thwart Sen. Joe McCarthy, the Communist-hater.

In the past four years, Lipkin has undergone four surgeries, at times sidetracking her dream of a theater company of able-bodied and disabled actors. In the fall of 1996, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Survival bestowed on her a greater sense of urgency about her life and work, and a personal revelation about what she calls the "fluidity of our identity."

"This is such a physical, external culture we live in, so that it's frequently difficult to get through the packaging," Lipkin, 46, says. "But what happens when some of that packaging is stripped away? Who are we when some of those qualities are altered in some major way. Who are we to other people?

"That's not to say I'm idealizing people with disabilities," she says. "There are people with disabilities who are heroic and there are those with disabilities who are mean-spirited. But when circumstances are altered, it seems like our souls can be seen more clearly.

"If you think about it from the point of view of a person who can't speak, or from somebody who is in a wheelchair, it would seem that certain physical attributes are just that. They're certain physical attributes and yet, we're so reliant on them. But someone doesn't cease to be a person because they can't walk."

This spring, Lipkin's conversations have been lightning riffs on the relevance of theater, gigs coming and gone, arts funding, publicity for their fledgling troupe and the delicateness of an ensemble. She worries over Colleen Gilmore, whose multiple sclerosis -- the relapsing, remitting type -- has flared up. But Colleen continues to work as a nurse and act.

Lipkin is also trying to figure out where the company goes from here.

When she first conceived of the DisAbility Project, she imagined they would do one major production and then move on. Since February, when the Project did its first public performance before mostly family and friends, requests have come in almost weekly, most of them from social service, educational and religious groups. The biggest one looms: a performance for the eighth annual International Post-Polio and Independent Living Conference.

Now, Lipkin wonders whether they should continue to tour. And if they do, where can they find fit theater space to rehearse and perform in?

Lipkin is looking for a space different from the standard proscenium setting. The project's space has to accommodate more than the typical few accessible seats. She imagines a space with no fixed seats, where the actors could make of it what they will.

A new vocabulary

After watching the exercise on organisms, Lipkin asks for impressions. She was drawn to Rodriguez's movements, the lilt of her arms and the tilt of her head. Graceful. Rodriguez says she feels more comfortable about moving, even with her limited mobility, than she used to.

Lipkin: "You were finding a new movement vocabulary."

Instead of being pushed, they're pushing society's boundaries.

"Because people look at people with disabilities and say, 'Hmm, well, I don't think these people really have anything going on," Rodriguez says. "But here we are as a group. We're going to force society to look at us and we're doing the things that society doesn't normally think we can do.

"Hell, years ago, we wouldn't have been alive. We'd be shut in an institution. But here we are. We're not only going to act and say things, we're going to do things with our bodies."

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Americans with Disabilities Act

The Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in employment, state and local government, public accommodations, commercial facilities, transportation and telecommunications. It also applies to Congress.

To be protected by the ADA, one must have a disability or have a relationship or association with an individual with a disability.

Who is covered? An individual with a disability is defined by the ADA as a person who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, a person who has a history or record of such an impairment or a person who is perceived by others as having such an impairment. The ADA does not specifically name all of the impairments that are covered.

Source: "A Guide to Disability Rights Laws," U.S. Department of Justice. This booklet also is available in large print, Braille, audio tape and computer disk.