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      Martyna Majok on Hoping for Magic, and Wishing for Ghosts

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      The playwright, whose Pulitzer-winning “Cost of Living” is now on Broadway, talks about “the precarity of life” and our inherent need to be taken care of.The playwright Martyna Majok has never met her father, so it was her grandfather who played the paternal role in her life. When he died, in Poland in August 2012, she didn’t have the money to travel to his funeral.“Also, I was afraid to go,” she said on a recent afternoon, “because I just didn’t want it to be true.” Not being there, though, gave his death a sense of unreality for her: “Sometimes I just think that we haven’t spoken for a long time.”Majok (pronounced MY-oak) was missing him on the snowy January night in 2014 when she lost her job at a bar in downtown Manhattan. (“They thought I had stolen $100, and they fired me because I was mouthy.”) Back home at the latest in a string of sublets, she started to write the poignant comic monologue that opens her Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Cost of Living.” It’s spoken by a hapless former trucker named Eddie, whose unmooring grief for his dead wife has him wanting to believe she’s texting him from the Great Beyond.“He’s hoping for some kind of magic, some miracle, something that communicates to him that we don’t just disappear,” Majok said in an upstairs lounge at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, where “Cost of Living” — which she dedicated to her grandfather, Pawel Majok — is having a limited Broadway run through Nov. 6. “That was definitely where I was at when I was writing it. I kept hoping that I would see my grandfather’s ghost. I was seeking it out. I was looking for signs.”Katy Sullivan and David Zayas in the Broadway production of “Cost of Living.” Majok insists that her disabled characters be played by disabled actors, a decision that Sullivan calls “bold as hell.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs tinged with longing as “Cost of Living” is, it’s also laugh-out-loud funny. Yet Majok considers it a romance, twining the stories of two New Jersey couples: Eddie and his estranged wife, Ani, who is adjusting to paraplegia following an accident; and Jess, a working-class graduate of a prestigious university who takes a job as a personal care aide to John, a wealthy doctoral student with cerebral palsy.Class figures prominently, as does disability. But to Majok it is a play about “the precarity of life” — the way that one bad break, financial or physical or emotional, can tumble a person into desperation — and the need we all have to be taken care of.Majok, who once juggled late-night bartending jobs with work as a personal care aide to two disabled men, insists that her disabled characters must be played by disabled actors. That stipulation, she said, has gained “Cost of Living” a reputation for being difficult to produce, and led some rights seekers to ask her to make an exception. Short answer: No.“Which I think is brave and bold as hell,” said the actor Katy Sullivan, an amputee who has played Ani in five productions — the world premiere at Williamstown Theater Festival in 2016, Off Broadway in 2017, Los Angeles in 2018, London in 2019 and now Broadway. “I am certain that she has lost out on income because she has drawn that line in the sand.”Majok is just as fierce in her dramaturgy, unafraid of lulling “Cost of Living” audiences into a pleasurable sense of comfort only to spring on them a plot twist that makes the whole room gasp, uncertain whether the emergency onstage is real or part of the play. During the Off Broadway run at Manhattan Theater Club, she recalled, a woman got out of her seat at that moment in the performance and started moving toward the stage to help.“I found that so beautiful,” Majok said, “because to me it was like, look at how instantly we care for people.”This is the tender-tough yin and yang of Majok, who pivots to humor if she tears up, as she did in speaking about her grandfather, the same way her characters joke if they go anywhere near self-pity.Lesson in betrayal: Sharlene Cruz, left, and Jasai Chase-Owens in last year’s New York Theater Workshop production of Majok’s “Sanctuary City,” at the Lucille Lortel Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJo Bonney, the director of the Williamstown, Off Broadway and Broadway productions of “Cost of Living,” said that Majok as a playwright “is never sentimental, even when people are in dire circumstances. She has faith, I think, in human resiliency. And that’s just very powerful.”Majok, whose other plays include “Sanctuary City” (2021), about a pair of undocumented teenagers, and “Queens” (2018), set among immigrant women sharing a basement apartment, was 5 when she came to the United States from Poland. She grew up mainly in New Jersey, where her mother cleaned houses and still sometimes does on the side.“I have offered to pay her to not clean,” Majok said. “‘I will give you $75 to not clean this house.’ And she’s like, ‘Why don’t you just give me $75 and I’ll still clean the house?’ I’m like, ‘No!’ Scarcity mind-set, scarcity mind-set.”In her childhood, there was some back and forth to Poland before she and her mother became firmly rooted here. Majok feels self-imposed guilt about having chosen as an adult to remain in this country, where her mother and younger sister are, rather than return to Poland, where their extended family is.That’s one reason the markers of success that she’s accumulated — among them an undergraduate degree in 2007 from the University of Chicago, an M.F.A. in 2012 from the Yale School of Drama, the Pulitzer in 2018, the Broadway debut this month — matter to her, as validation of her writing and her life.“I feel like I’m apologizing for leaving Poland,” she said in a second interview, which she’d requested in part to elucidate this. “If you leave your family, it better be [expletive] worth it.”What’s next for the playwright? She’s in the process of adapting a couple of books into films, and collaborating on a musical adaptation of “The Great Gatsby.” Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesScrupulous in her thinking, meticulous in her writing, Majok is easy with profanity. That day, sitting on a bench overlooking the Heather Garden in Fort Tryon Park, near her apartment in Upper Manhattan, she wore a gold necklace that she’d taken off before the photo shoot for this article, figuring it would never make it into a published picture.From a distance its lowercase cursive looks like maybe it’s spelling out a name. On closer inspection, though, it’s one brief expletive, three times in a row — a gift from Marin Ireland, who starred in the 2016 New York premiere of “Ironbound,” Majok’s breakthrough play about a Polish immigrant much like her mother, in which variations on that word appear 68 times.In the “Cost of Living” script, the number is 77, counting an author’s note explaining that in “the Jersey mouth” — and Majok does, after all, have a Jersey mouth — the expletive in question “is often used as a comma, or as a vocalized pause, akin to the word ‘like.’”Despite lingering worries about what she calls “the [expletive] hubris” of presuming she has the luxury to turn down work, Majok lets herself be picky these days about the projects she takes on. She has said yes to adapting a couple of books into films that she’s not yet allowed to discuss, but no to assorted screen projects about “lady murders.” On her wish list? Making a film of “Cost of Living.”And while she was never a collaborator on the musical adaptation of that play, which was announced in 2018, she is collaborating on a musical adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” — which sounds like an odd fit until she says that she sees Jay Gatsby as a working-class character.It’s a psychology that she understands.Far more stable than when she started out, Majok still has a vigilance within — a part of her that is forever anticipating the kind of fracture that could break her life.“I feel like I’m more prepared for catastrophe,” she said. “But you never [expletive] know.” More

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      ‘I Didn’t See You There’ Review: A View From His Seat

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      The filmmaker Reid Davenport, by turns pensive and irritated, takes viewers inside his life as a disabled person through footage shot entirely from his perspective.In the personal essay film “I Didn’t See You There” the filmmaker, Reid Davenport, makes an extended attempt to fully embody his point of view with the help of kinetic camerawork. As an artist with a disability, Davenport navigates the world in a wheelchair, with verve and little patience for the obstacles others can pose, both physical and ideological.His trips around Oakland, Calif., and across the country to visit his caring family in Connecticut lead him to reflect on “being looked at and not seen,” as he puts it, as well as on the labor of just going about his business in a world that doesn’t always have his needs in mind. His occasional meditations in voice-over are punctuated by pointed encounters with strangers, from flight attendants to an impressed neighbor, and an energizing percussive soundtrack.Davenport also dwells on dazzling views of the patterned surfaces — such as colorful pavements and walls — that he rolls past. These suggest a heightened attention to potential hazards, but they also evoke the joyous run-on reels of avant-garde diarists like the filmmaker Jonas Mekas.Davenport’s circumstances are different, of course. His mobility is often dependent on others, and he keeps the camera off himself, in contrast with the many dramas that turn people with disabilities into passive subjects. When he encounters a circus big top that has been erected in his neighborhood, he laments its galling presence and its associated history of freak shows.With his feature, Davenport stakes out his own vantage point on the world, one that leaves a viewer wishing to hear his thoughts elaborated even further.I Didn’t See You ThereNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 16 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Music

      Beyoncé Will Change ‘Heated’ Lyrics After ‘Ableist Slur’ Criticism

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      The pop star’s decision to replace two words in her song “Heated” follows Lizzo’s removal of the same term, which has been used as a slur against disabled people, from her track “Grrrls.”Days after the release of her latest album, “Renaissance,” Beyoncé will modify the lyrics of one of its songs, a representative for the singer said on Monday, in response to an outcry from disability rights advocates who say the pop star should not have used a word that has historically been employed as a derogatory slur.In “Heated,” a dancehall-inspired track, the singer uses the words “spaz” and “spazzin’” in an energetically recited portion of the song that’s a callback to the freestyles at some ballroom events. Activists condemned the use of the word in social media posts, pointing out that another pop star, Lizzo, had removed the same lyric from a song following similar backlash in June.“The word, not used intentionally in a harmful way, will be replaced,” a spokeswoman for Beyoncé said in an email.The word at issue is based on spastic diplegia, a form of cerebral palsy that causes motor impairments in the legs or arms. In June, Hannah Diviney, a writer and disability advocate from Australia, tweeted about Lizzo’s use of the word, noting that to a person with cerebral palsy like her, spasticity referred to an “unending painful tightness” in her legs, and urged the singer to “do better.” In response to the criticism from fans and activists, Lizzo changed her song, “Grrrls,” and wrote in a statement that “this is the result of me listening and taking action.”Diviney wrote in an op-ed, published in The Guardian on Monday, that her “heart sank” when she learned that Beyoncé’s new album had used the same word.“I thought we’d changed the music industry and started a global conversation about why ableist language — intentional or not — has no place in music,” Diviney wrote. “But I guess I was wrong, because now Beyoncé has gone and done exactly the same thing.”Disability right advocates have noted that the word has been more commonly used as a derogatory term in the United Kingdom compared to the United States. Scope, a group in Britain that campaigns for equality for people with disabilities, tweeted, “Disabled people’s experiences are not fodder for song lyrics,” and urged Beyoncé to follow Lizzo’s example. More

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      Who Can Play the King? Representation Questions Fuel Casting Debates.

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      Should Shakespeare’s Richard III be reserved for disabled actors? Does the character have to be played by a white man? By a man at all? Three recent productions took different tacks.When three of the most prestigious Shakespeare companies in the world staged “Richard III” this summer, each took a different approach to casting its scheming title character in ways that illuminate the fraught debate over which actors should play which roles.At the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, Richard was played by the actor Arthur Hughes, who has radial dysplasia, which means he has a shorter right arm and a missing thumb. The company said it was the first time it had cast a disabled actor to play the character, who describes himself in the opening scene as “deformed.” The production’s director, Gregory Doran, who was until recently the Royal Shakespeare’s artistic director, told The Times of London earlier this year that having actors pretend to be disabled to play “Richard III” would “probably not be acceptable” these days.The Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, took a different tack: It cast Colm Feore, who is not disabled, to play a Richard who has a deformed spine but who is not a hunchback. And in New York City, the Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park went in yet another direction, casting Danai Gurira, a Black woman who does not have a disability, as the duke who schemes and kills his way to the throne of England.Their varying approaches came at a moment when an intense rethinking of the cultural norms around identity, representation, diversity, opportunity, imagination and artistic license have led to impassioned debates, and battles, over casting.It has been decades since major theaters have had white actors play Othello in blackface, and, after years of criticism, performances by white actors playing caricatured Asian roles are growing rarer in theater and film, and are being rethought in opera and ballet.Now there are questions about who should play gay characters (Tom Hanks recently told The New York Times Magazine that today he would, rightly, not be cast as a gay attorney dying of AIDS, as he was in his Academy Award-winning role in the 1993 film “Philadelphia”) or transgender characters (Eddie Redmayne said last year that it had been a “mistake” to play a trans character in 2015’s “The Danish Girl”) or characters of different ethnicities and religions. (Bradley Cooper faced criticism this year for using a prosthetic nose to play the Jewish conductor Leonard Bernstein in a forthcoming biopic.)Tom Hanks recently said that today he would, correctly, not be cast as a gay attorney dying of AIDS, as he was in the film “Philadelphia,” which he starred in with Denzel Washington.TriStar PicturesWhile many celebrate the move away from old, sometimes stereotyped portrayals and the new opportunities belatedly being given to actors from a diverse array of backgrounds, others worry that the current insistence on literalism and authenticity can be too constraining. Acting, after all, is the art of pretending to be someone you are not.“The essential nature of art is freedom,” said the Oscar-winning actor F. Murray Abraham, whose many credits include Shylock, the Jewish moneylender of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” though Mr. Abraham is not Jewish. “Once we impose any kind of control over it, it’s no longer free.”And while the recent insistence on more authentic casting promises greater diversity in some respects, it threatens less in others — coming as many women and actors of color are getting more opportunities to play some of the greatest, meatiest roles in the repertory, regardless of whatever race or gender or background the playwrights may have initially envisioned.More About on Deaf CultureUpending Perceptions: The poetic art of Christine Sun Kim, who was born deaf, challenges viewers to reconsider how they hear and perceive the world.‘Coda’: The Oscar-winning film showcases deaf actors and lives. But some deaf viewers found its hearing perspective frustrating. Seeking Representation: Though deafness is gaining visibility onscreen, deaf people who rely on hearing devices say their experiences remain mostly untold. Name Signs: Name signs are the equivalent of a first name in some sign languages. We asked a few people to share the story behind theirs.Sometimes such casting is considered “colorblind,” in which case audiences are asked to look beyond an actor’s race or ethnicity, or other features. But in recent years the trend has been toward “color-conscious” casting, in which an actor’s race, ethnicity or identity becomes part of the production, and a feature of the character being portrayed.The casting of Mr. Hughes in a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Britain was hailed as the first time the company had cast a disabled actor in the title role.Ellie Kurttz, via Royal Shakespeare CompanySome of the varied approaches were underscored by this summer’s productions of “Richard III,” and the different directions each theater took when choosing an actor to play Richard.Richard tells the audience in the opening scene that he is:Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my timeInto this breathing world, scarce half made up,And that so lamely and unfashionableThat dogs bark at me as I halt by themThe remark by Mr. Doran, the director of the Royal Shakespeare Company production, that it would “probably not be acceptable” these days to have actors pretend to be disabled to play Richard caused a stir in theater circles.Not only is Mr. Doran a renowned Shakespearean, but his husband, Antony Sher, who died last year, was one of the most memorable Richards of recent decades, using crutches in an acclaimed 1984 production and writing a book about his portrayal.Mr. Doran, whose production in Stratford-upon-Avon was critically lauded, later clarified his thinking about its casting, explaining that while any actor might be a successful Richard, he believed the role should be reserved for disabled actors until they “have the opportunities across the board now more widely afforded to other actors.”The new staging in Stratford, Ontario, featuring Mr. Feore, listed a “disability consultant” in its credits. His depiction was inspired by the discovery of Richard’s bones nearly a decade ago — the skeleton suggested a form of scoliosis — and rested on the idea that his physique “was less of a medical disability than a social and cultural one,” the company’s spokeswoman, Ann Swerdfager, said in an email. The critic Karen Fricker wrote in The Toronto Star: “As much as I admired Feore’s performance, it did lead me to wonder if this will be the last able-bodied actor making a star turn as a disabled character on the Stratford stage, given crucial conversations currently happening around deaf and disability performance.”And in New York, Ms. Gurira, who has appeared in “Black Panther” and the television series “The Walking Dead,” tried to explore the underlying reasons for Richard’s behavior. “There is a psychological reason for what he becomes,” she said in an interview. “He’s looking at the rules in front of him, and he feels he’s most capable, but the rules disallow him from manifesting his full capability.”The production’s director, Robert O’Hara, said that they made Richard’s difference key to the interpretation. “Richard’s otherness becomes an entire reason for his behavior,” he said in an interview. “He feels like now he has to play a part people projected onto him.”Ms. Gurira, left, said her approach to Richard aimed to get at the “psychological reason for what he becomes.” She appeared with Daniel J. Watts, right.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe rest of the cast for the production, which ended its run earlier this month, was notably diverse, and included several actors with disabilities in roles that are not usually cast that way. Ali Stroker, a Tony-winning actress who uses a wheelchair, played Lady Anne; Monique Holt, who is Deaf, played Richard’s mother, the two typically communicating onstage via American Sign Language.“I wanted to open up the conversation from ‘Why isn’t Richard being played by a disabled actor?’ to ‘Why isn’t every role considered able to be played by a disabled actor?’” Mr. O’Hara said.Ayanna Thompson, a professor of English at Arizona State University and a Shakespeare scholar in residence at the Public Theater who consulted on its “Richard III,” argued that the growing embrace of color-conscious casting reflected contemporary understandings of how different attributes inflect both actors’ identities and audiences’ perceptions.“All of our bodies carry meaning on stage, whether or not we want to acknowledge that. And that’s going to affect storytelling,” Ms. Thompson said.She pointed to an example from another play: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, friends of Hamlet’s, whom other characters often confuse for each other. “If Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are played by Black actors and the Hamlet family is all-white,” she said, “the inability to distinguish carries a whole set of different meanings.”Many productions upend traditional casting to interrogate classics. Women played every role in a trilogy of acclaimed Shakespeare productions directed by Phyllida Lloyd at Donmar Warehouse in London, seen in New York at St. Ann’s Warehouse. A “Julius Caesar” directed by Mr. Doran reset the scene from ancient Rome to modern Africa. Even Hollywood has reimagined some blockbusters, as with the gender-swapped 2016 “Ghostbusters.”Harriet Walter, with hands outstretched, in a 2013 production of “Julius Caesar,” in which all of the roles were played by women. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut as there is a push for greater casting freedoms in some areas, there is an argument for more literalism in others, especially from actors with certain backgrounds who lack opportunities.Some disabled actors are upset when they see Richard III, one of the juiciest disabled characters in the canon, go to someone else. “We all want a level playing field where everybody can play everybody,” said Mat Fraser, an English actor who is disabled and has played Richard, “but my entire career I’ve not been allowed to play hardly anybody.”In 2016, while accepting an Emmy for his turn as a transgender character in “Transparent,” Jeffrey Tambor said that he hoped to be “the last cisgender male to play a transgender female.” Now, with a “Transparent” stage musical being created in Los Angeles, its creator, Joey Soloway, vowed in an interview: “No trans person should be played by a cis person. Zero tolerance.”The conversation on casting has been evolving in recent years.“It used to be that part of the measurement of greatness was your ability to transform yourself,” said Isaac Butler, the author of “The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act,” a new history of Method acting. “Is versatility still the hallmark of good acting? And how do you approach it if there are certain identity lines you cannot cross? And which are those identity lines?”Gregg Mozgala, left, an actor with cerebral palsy, says he has to bring his “full humanity to every character I play.” He appeared with Jolly Abraham in 2017 in a production of the play “Cost of Living.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGregg Mozgala, an actor with cerebral palsy, has played roles that are not traditionally portrayed as disabled, as he did playing two monarchs in “Richard III” in New York, and sometimes plays characters written as having cerebral palsy, as he will this fall in a Broadway production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Cost of Living.”“I spent years trying to pretend my disability didn’t exist in life and onstage, which is ridiculous, because it does,” Mr. Mozgala said.“Every character I ever play is going to have cerebral palsy — there’s nothing I can do about that,” he added. “I have to bring my full humanity to every character I play.”Some still hold out hope for a day when identity will recede in the conversation.“A hundred years from now, do I hope white actors could play Othello?” said Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater’s artistic director. “Sure, because it would mean racism wasn’t the explosive issue it is now.” More

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      Ford and Mellon Foundations Announce 2022 Disability Futures Fellows

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      A Broadway actress, documentary filmmaker and DC comic artist are among this year’s recipients. They were selected by fellow disabled artists from a pool of about 60 nominees.Nasreen Alkhateeb, a filmmaker who has documented Kamala Harris on the campaign trail; Antoine Hunter, also known as Purple Fire Crow, a Deaf, Indigenous choreographer whose work has been performed around the world; and Tee Franklin, who is writing new Harley Quinn comics for DC, are among the second class of disability futures fellows, the Ford and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations announced on Wednesday.The fellowship provides 20 disabled U.S. artists, filmmakers and journalists with unrestricted $50,000 grants administered by the arts funding group United States Artists. They are chosen by peer advisers who are themselves disabled artists. The fellowship supports people at all stages of their careers, and the class includes emerging and established artists.One grant recipient, Corbett Joan O’Toole, 70, an activist and historian who was featured in the Oscar-nominated documentary “Crip Camp,” said, “I’m really shocked.”“I do a lot of good work, but it’s not necessarily the prominent stuff,” she said. “It’s networking, providing resources for people, filling in the gaps.”This is the second class of fellows in the program, which was established in 2020 as part of an effort to increase the visibility and elevate the voices of disabled artists. Originally conceived as an 18-month initiative, the foundations announced last year that they would commit an additional $5 million to support the program through 2025.About one in four adults in the United States has a disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Dickie Hearts, a Deaf, gay and BIPOC actor and filmmaker known for his recurring role in Netflix’s San Francisco-set series “Tales of the City,” said he hoped to use the funding to produce a live version of an original concept musical in American Sign Language that he had directed remotely on Zoom during the pandemic.“I would love to see more deaf people behind the scenes, as well as onscreen,” he said in a video interview this week, which was conducted with the assistance of an ASL interpreter. “I want to see more creative executives, deaf directors,” executive producers and writers.The grants offer flexible compensation options. The money can be distributed in a lump sum, in payments or even be deferred, depending on what works best for the artist.Also among the recipients are Alexandria Wailes, a deaf actor who recently portrayed the Lady in Purple in the Broadway revival of Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf”; JJJJJerome Ellis, a composer and poet who has a stutter (the reason for the repeated J’s in his name) and produces work about stuttering and Blackness; and Wendy Lu, a journalist and disability rights advocate who was recently hired as an editor by The New York Times.“I’m working on a book that’s coming out next year, playing concerts again, dancing more — it’s so exciting to be back working live,” said Ellis, 33, who about a year and a half ago moved back to Virginia, where he grew up, from New York.The inaugural class of fellows included the choreographer Alice Sheppard, the filmmaker Jim LeBrecht and the journalist Alice Wong.The Ford and Mellon Foundations are planning to invite people in the philanthropy and cultural sectors to learn from fellows and disability arts leaders at a symposium in New York in 2025, and fellows will be invited to a networking retreat in 2024. More

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      in Movies

      Study Shows Disability Representation Onscreen Is Increasing, but Still Falls Short

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      The study published Tuesday also showed that television continues to lag behind film when it comes to representation of characters with disabilities.“CODA,” a film about the hearing child of deaf parents, won this year’s Academy Award for best picture, and one of its stars, Troy Kotsur, became the first deaf man to win an acting Oscar when he took home the award for best supporting actor. Lauren Ridloff became the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first deaf superhero in “Eternals.” The Hulu mystery-comedy series “Only Murders in the Building” won acclaim for an almost entirely silent episode that highlighted the perspective of a deaf character (played by James Caverly).Even with these prominent examples of disability representation onscreen, relative to the approximately 26 percent of adults in the United States who have a physical or psychological disability, representation continued to lag behind, a new study released Tuesday by Nielsen found. The report, whose release was timed to the 32nd anniversary of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, analyzed the representation of disabled characters on film and TV shows released from 1918 to 2022.The titles came from a Nielsen database that included about 164,000 films and TV shows that premiered over the past century. Of those, about 4.2 percent, or 6,895 titles, were tagged as having significant disability themes or content.Disability inclusion was highest, the study found, in 2019, when 518 productions with disability themes were released.Across the board in this year’s report, films again fared better than television — of the 6,895 titles that featured significant disability themes or content, about 59 percent (4,066) were feature films, and 18 percent (1,209) were regular series. (The remaining depictions were in other categories like short films, limited series, TV movies or specials.)Those numbers represent a slight shift toward television from last year, when a Nielsen report showed that 64 percent of depictions of disabled characters were in feature films, and 16 percent were in regular television series.A survey of more than 2,000 smartphone users on disability representation in media conducted in the first quarter of 2022 also found that people with disabilities were much more likely to take issue with portrayals of disabled characters. Viewers with disabilities were 34 percent more likely to say there was not enough representation of their identity group in media, and they were 52 percent more likely than those who did not identify as having a disability to characterize a TV portrayal of their identity group as inaccurate.Lauren Appelbaum, a vice president at RespectAbility, a nonprofit organization that participated in the Nielsen study last year, told The Times then that though the number of disabled characters continued to increase, approximately 95 percent of those roles were still portrayed by actors who did not have disabilities.But there have also been positive representations, as on the HBO series “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” which features a character who uses a wheelchair (played by Lauren Spencer, known as Lolo), a confident student who attends the show’s iconic nude party. Alaqua Cox also won acclaim for her performance as Maya Lopez/Echo, a deaf Cheyenne woman who has the ability to imitate other people’s movements, in the Disney+ series “Hawkeye.” More

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      The ‘Most Real Richard III There’s Ever Been’

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      The Royal Shakespeare Company has cast a disabled actor to play the “deformed, unfinish’d” king for the first time. The choice has been hailed as a landmark moment.STRATFORD-UPON-AVON, England — A raucous party was underway in one of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s rehearsal rooms this month as the cast of “Richard III” ran through the play’s opening, dancing in a conga line while music blared and balloons bounced off the floor.Off to one side, the future Richard III sneered at the scene. Shakespeare depicted the king as a scheming hunchback who murdered his way to the British throne, and in this imagining of the play, he is personified by the 30-year-old actor Arthur Hughes. In role, Hughes stepped into the middle of the party, veering through the revelers to deliver the play’s famed opening speech: “Now is the winter of our discontent,” he began.As the speech continues, Richard lists the insults he has faced. He is “curtail’d of this fair proportion”; he is “cheated of feature”; he is “deformed, unfinish’d.” As Hughes declaimed each barb, he angrily squeezed a white balloon. Eventually the pressure became too much. The balloon popped.The moment of tension was made even more powerful by Hughes’s own appearance. He has radial dysplasia, meaning he was born with a shorter right arm, his wrist bending into the body and his hand missing a thumb.The first casting by the Royal Shakespeare Company of a disabled actor to play Richard III has been hailed as an advance in British theater. The play opened in Stratford-upon-Avon on Thursday and runs through Oct. 8.“You can see a despot and tyrant,” Hughes said of Richard III, “but also a little boy who hasn’t been loved and someone who’s shunned.”Ellie Kurttz, via Royal Shakespeare CompanyShakespeare used and amplified Richard III’s real-life condition — the king is thought to have had scoliosis or curvature of the spine — to highlight the character’s unsavory nature. (He is described at one point as a “pois’nous bunch-back’d toad.”) According to Gregory Doran, the director of the current adaptation, the casting of Hughes in the role “sends out a big message, just as not casting a disabled actor would have sent out a different message.”Hughes’s casting comes as the frequency of disabled actors earning major roles appears to be growing in British theater. In July, the National Theater will present “All of Us” by Francesca Martinez, an actor and playwright who has cerebral palsy (Martinez said in a telephone interview that the play would feature three disabled actors, including herself). And Liz Carr, who uses a wheelchair, this year won an Olivier Award, Britain’s equivalent of a Tony, for her performance in Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” at the National.In her Olivier acceptance speech, Carr highlighted some persistent problems. “There’s so many fears of risk of employing disabled actors,” she said, but added the award “proves we can do it, we can project, we can fill a stage.”Jack Thorne, the playwright behind “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and an activist for disabled people, said in a telephone interview that there was “definitely a willingness” to expand disabled casting in Britain. The National Theater was a leader, he said, as were six regional theaters behind an initiative called Ramps on the Moon that stages productions led by deaf and disabled actors.Yet there was still a dearth of lead roles in London’s commercial heartland, he said. “There aren’t West End shows with disabled leads,” he added. In discussions about diversity, the issue was routinely forgotten, he said. Theaters should bring in targets to increase participation, he said.The National Theater, for instance, has experimented with aspirational quotas for women and people of color, but not for disabled people. Alastair Coomer, the theater’s head of casting, said in a telephone interview that new targets were being discussed and that he “would not be surprised” if that discrepancy was addressed.Hughes in a Royal Shakespeare Company costume storeroom. “Richard III” plays in the company’s repertoire through Oct. 8.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesHughes, eating potato chips in a break from rehearsal, said he hoped his casting as Richard III “sets the mold for how the industry can change.”Growing up in Aylesbury, a town about 40 miles northwest of London, Hughes said that he had experienced few barriers to pursuing acting. As a child, he said, he was so enthusiastic in drama classes that he was given prime roles, such as Puck in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”Hughes said that he had read “Richard III” for the first time while looking for speeches to use when auditioning for drama schools. He instantly identified with the role, he added, since the play’s characters view the future king as “not cut out for big parts” because of his looks. “I was like, ‘Oh, that’s me,’” Hughes said.After drama school, Hughes did not immediately secure an agent — unlike many of his colleagues. “Voices in my head were going, ‘Are you a risk?’” he said, but those doubts lifted after he secured a role in a production by Graeae, a British theater company that casts deaf and disabled actors. Before then, Hughes said, he felt his appearance “was going to hold me back,” but after being surrounded by other disabled actors, he felt empowered. He even started wearing short sleeves to highlight his limb difference, he added.The Royal Shakespeare Company show is Hughes’s most high-profile casting to date. In May, Doran gave an interview to The Times of London that was headlined: “Able-Bodied Actors Cannot Be Richard III.” In a letter of complaint to that newspaper, Doran said that the headline was misleading. His point, he wrote, was that, although anybody could play the role, a disabled actor could “enhance the performance and impact of the production.”Richard III is often portrayed as an almost comedic bad guy, Hughes said, often with a fake “hump and limp.” While not trying to hide the character’s villainy, he hoped to draw attention to his motivations: “You can see a despot and tyrant,” he said, “but also a little boy who hasn’t been loved and someone who’s shunned and outcast and is underestimated.”Mat Fraser, another disabled actor, who played Richard III in a production in Hull in northern England in 2017, said that the king was often played by older performers who could make the king seem a “withered little twig.” But Hughes is young and muscular — better suited to portraying a monarch who died at age 32 on a battlefield, Fraser said. “We’re going to see the most real Richard III there’s ever been,” he added.Hughes said he was already looking beyond his turn as Richard to other Shakespeare roles, and would love to play Hamlet, and Iago from “Othello.”“I’d like to play a role that’s not specified as disabled,” he said. “Obviously, whichever role I play will be disabled by the very nature of me playing it,” he added. “But that’s not the point.”Richard IIIThrough Oct. 8 at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, England; rsc.org.uk. 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      Lizzo Changes “Grrrls” Lyric After Outcry

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      The song “Grrrls” was released Friday and updated Monday to remove a derogatory term for people with disabilities, which she said she did not use with an intent to offend.Lizzo, a Grammy-winning singer and rapper seen by many fans as a champion of inclusivity, changed a lyric on a new song within days of its release after it was criticized for containing a word considered derogatory toward people with disabilities.In the original version of the song “Grrrls” released on Friday, Lizzo used the word “spaz” to indicate that she was going to lose control. The word is based on spastic diplegia, a form of cerebral palsy, a condition that causes motor impairments in the legs or arms.Fans and disability advocates called on Lizzo to change what they called an ableist slur, a word seen as particularly harmful in some countries where it has a history of being used as a schoolhouse taunt.By Monday, the major music streaming services had substituted the original version of the song with one that replaces the line with “Hold me back.” In a statement posted to Instagram on Monday, Lizzo said she understood the effects of harmful language, whether intentional or unintentional, because “As a fat black woman in America, I’ve had many hurtful words used against me.”“Let me make one thing clear: I never want to promote derogatory language,” she said, later adding: “This is the result of me listening and taking action.”For Lizzo, who enjoys a warm public persona and produces upbeat, feel-good music that promotes self-acceptance, the lyric struck fans as particularly off-brand. The criticism began almost immediately after the song, the latest single from her upcoming album, “Special,” was released on Friday.Inside Lizzo’s WorldThe Grammy-winning singer is known for her fierce lyrics, fashion and personality.‘Big Grrrls’: The singer wanted a new kind of backup dancer. In her pursuit of proper representation, she created a TV show.‘Feel-Good Music’: Lizzo says her music is as much about building yourself up as it is about accepting where you are.Why ‘Truth Hurts’ Matters: In 2020, The New York Times Magazine put her No. 1 hit on its list of songs that define the moment.Diary of a Song: Watch how Lizzo made “Juice,” a party song that packs all of her joy and charm into three danceable minutes.But the swift removal satisfied many of the fans and activists who had criticized her, believing it to be an example of someone listening, learning and acting on new information.Hannah Diviney, a disability advocate in Australia and self-proclaimed Lizzo fan, said in an interview that hearing the word in the original version “made me feel really uncomfortable.” For her, spasticity refers to an “unending, constant, painful tightness in my legs and other parts of my body,” making her life “very difficult and is not something I can control.”But she was “blown away” by Lizzo’s rapid reversal, she said. Instead of being defensive, the rapper took action once she heard the criticism, making her “a real genuine ally because she’s willing to learn.”“I’m really glad that Lizzo changing it has led to lots of people learning that it’s a slur,” Ms. Diviney said. “And while I obviously would have preferred she didn’t use it in the first place, I’m glad it became something of a teachable moment. That’s probably the best outcome.”After one of her tweets was reshared more than a thousand times, Ms. Diviney learned that it may not be as clear to some Americans as to people in other countries why the word is considered ableist, she said.Warren Kirwan, a spokesman for Scope, a group in Britain that campaigns for equality for people with disabilities, said the term has been “quite a common term of abuse for disabled people for the better part of 30 years in the U.K.” In 1994, the organization changed its name from The Spastic Society to Scope to avoid association with the slur.The differing cultural contexts may help explain why Lizzo, an American, used the term, even if it doesn’t excuse it, he said. But Lizzo handled the situation well once she learned more about the word, he said.“It was in her power to own that mistake and change it, and well done for doing that,” Mr. Kirwan said.Other musicians have made the same mistake. Kanye West was criticized for using the word in a 2015 song “FourFiveSeconds,” a collaboration with Paul McCartney and Rihanna. And in 2014, Weird Al Yankovic said he was “deeply sorry” for including a related word in his song “Word Crimes,” saying he didn’t know it was considered offensive. More