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    Andrea Fay Friedman, Who Built a Breakthrough Acting Career, Dies at 53

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    Ms. Friedman, who called Down syndrome her “up syndrome,” forged an unlikely path in acting by playing characters with developmental disabilities.Andrea Fay Friedman, an actress who starred in the groundbreaking television series “Life Goes On,” died on Sunday in her home in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 53.She died from complications of Alzheimer’s disease, according to her father, Hal Friedman. He said that she had not been able to speak for the past year because of the disease, which is common in people with Down syndrome who are over 50.Ms. Friedman was known for her portrayals of people with developmental disabilities. She called her Down syndrome her “up syndrome,” Mr. Friedman said in a phone interview.Ms. Friedman was born on June 1, 1970, in Santa Monica. After graduating from West Los Angeles Baptist High School, she studied acting and philosophy at Santa Monica College for two years.Her breakthrough in acting came in 1992 on the TV drama “Life Goes On,” in which she played Amanda Swanson, the girlfriend and later wife of the main character Charles “Corky” Thatcher, who also had Down syndrome. She played the character for two seasons.Mr. Friedman said that she got involved in the show while working at a child-care center during her college years. A parent there was writing the music for “Life Goes On,” he said, and suggested she pitch her ideas to the writers.She eventually convinced the producers to include another character who had Down syndrome, Mr. Friedman said. She was originally going to appear in just one episode, but “she did such a great job that they made her a regular on the show,” he said.She would later occasionally appear in other hit shows, like “Baywatch,” “ER” and “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.”In 2010, she had a “dispute” with Sarah Palin, the former Republican governor of Alaska and 2018 vice-presidential nominee, Mr. Friedman said.In an episode of “Family Guy,” Ms. Friedman voiced a girl with Down syndrome named Ellen, who dates the teenaged character Chris. Ellen tells him over dinner that her mother is “the former governor of Alaska.”Ms. Palin, whose son Trig has Down syndrome, said that the show “really isn’t funny” and was the work of “cruel, cold-hearted people.”Ms. Friedman wrote in an email to The New York Times at the time that Ms. Palin “does not have a sense of humor,” adding, “I think the word is ‘sarcasm.’”“In my family we think laughing is good,” she said. “My parents raised me to have a sense of humor and to live a normal life.”Her final appearance on screen was in the 2019 holiday drama “Carol of the Bells,” in which a man searches for his biological mother, played by Ms. Friedman, and learns she is developmentally disabled.Ms. Friedman also worked with students with intellectual disabilities through a program at U.C.L.A.She is survived by her sister, Katherine Holland, her brother-in-law, Grant Holland, her two nephews, Lawson and Andrew Holland, and Mr. Friedman, an entertainment industry lawyer. Her mother, Marjorie Jean Lawson, died about 10 years ago, Mr. Friedman said. More

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      in Music

      A Drummer Showing the Way to ‘the Freest Musical Universe’

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      BUENOS AIRES — The crowd at a recent concert exploded into rapturous cries as the group’s frontman walked onto the stage and began setting a drum beat, launching his band on an improvised journey across musical genres that culminated an hour later in a standing ovation.Over a 30-year career, Miguel Tomasín has released more than 100 albums, helped turn his Argentine band into one of South America’s most influential underground acts, and helped hundreds of people with disabilities express their voices through music.Mr. Tomasín has achieved this in part because of a distinctive artistic vision that comes, his family, fellow musicians and friends said, from having been born with Down syndrome. His story, they say, shows how art can help someone overcome social barriers, and what can happen with an effort to elevate a person’s talents, rather than focusing on their limitations.“We make music so that people enjoy it,” Mr. Tomasín said in an interview at his home in the windswept Argentine city of Rio Gallegos, near the country’s southern tip. Music is “the best, magical,” he added.Though his prolific output has not achieved commercial success, it has had a significant impact on how people with disabilities are perceived in Argentina and beyond.At a recent sold-out Reynols concert in Buenos Aires, Miguel Tomasín sang and played all the instruments on the stage in front of 600 fans.Video by Centro Cultural KirchnerIt has also inspired members of his band, Reynols, to establish long-running music workshops for people with disabilities. And other musicians they have worked with have started more bands whose members include those with developmental disabilities.“Thanks to Miguel, many people who had never interacted with a person with Down syndrome were able to become aware of their world through music,” said Patricio Conlazo, an occasional Reynols member who, after playing with Mr. Tomasín, started music projects for people with disabilities in southern Argentina.Reynols’s unconventional approach to music has also inspired established musicians.“I was reminded by him that you can play music as you like,” said Mitsuru Tabata, a veteran Japanese experimental musician who has recorded with Reynols.But the band’s freewheeling sound has its detractors, too.A prominent British music journalist, Ben Watson, called their music “annoying racket,” in his 2010 book “Honesty Is Explosive!” where he suggested that Mr. Tomasín’s presence in the band was a publicity stunt.The members of Reynols, from left; Alan Courtis, Patricio Conlazo, Mr. Tomasín and Roberto Conlazo in their dressing room before a concert in Buenos Aires.Mr. Tomasín playing the drums during the concert in Buenos Aires.In its first years, the band struggled to find venues and labels interested in their improvisational sound. A turning point came nearly a quarter century ago, in 1998, when they unexpectedly became a house band on an Argentine public television program, which exposed them to a new audience.The job made Mr. Tomasín the first Argentine with Down syndrome to be employed by a national broadcaster.“It was revolutionary, because people with these conditions were largely hidden from public view,” said Claudio Canali, who helped produce the program.A New York Times reporter and a photographer spent a week in Argentina to interview Mr. Tomasín and document his life, both in Buenos Aires and Rio Gallegos. Mr. Tomasín speaks in short phrases that are largely understandable to a Spanish speaker, but sometimes require an accompanying relative to put them in context.Mr. Tomasín is 58, though, like many other artists he lowers his age, insisting he is 54.He was born in Buenos Aires, the second of three children of middle-class parents. His father was a Navy captain, his mother a fine arts graduate who stayed home to raise the children.In the 1960s, most Argentine families sent children with Down syndrome to special boarding schools, which in practice were little more than asylums, according to his younger sister, Jorgelina Tomasín.After visiting several of them, his parents decided to raise Mr. Tomasín at home, where he was treated no differently than his siblings.Mr. Tomasín posing with a fan after the show in Buenos Aires.Mr. Tomasín improvising on the piano while wearing his favorite Reynols T-shirt.He started showing interest in sounds as a toddler, banging on kitchen pots and playing with a family piano, prompting his grandparents to buy him a toy drum kit.Later, after coming home from school, Mr. Tomasín would go straight to his room and play all three cassettes that he owned from beginning to end, making the crooners Julio Iglesias and Palito Ortega an inescapable house presence for years, Ms. Tomasín said.By the early 1990s, the close-knit household began to separate, as his siblings grew up and left home, leaving Mr. Tomasín, by then a young adult, feeling isolated.To fill the void, his parents decided to send him to a music school, but struggled to find one that would accept him.One day, in 1993, they tried an unassuming place they came across while shopping in their Buenos Aires neighborhood, the School for the Comprehensive Formation of Musicians, which was run by young avant-garde rockers who taught classes to subsidize their rehearsal space.“‘Hi, I’m Miguel, a great famous drummer,’” Roberto Conlazo, who ran the school with his brother Patricio, recalled Mr. Tomasín saying at their introduction, despite his having never, up to that point, touched a professional drum kit.Mr. Tomasín checking his drums.From left, Patricio Conlazo Mr. Tomasín and Roberto Conlazo during a rehearsal.The school became an unexpected artistic home for Mr. Tomasín. In a country that remains deeply divided by the legacy of a military dictatorship and a Marxist insurgency, it was rare for a military family to even associate with bohemian artists, let alone entrust a child with them.But Mr. Tomasín’s family and the artists ended up becoming lifelong friends, an early example of how his lack of social prejudices has influenced others to reconsider long-held assumptions. His spontaneity and lack of insecurities made Mr. Tomasín a natural improviser, and an ideal fit for the school’s goal to create music without preconceived ideas.“We were looking for the freest musical universe possible,” said Alan Courtis, who taught at the school. “Miguel became the alarm that woke up the dormant side of our brains.”Roberto Conlazo and Mr. Courtis had already been playing in a group that eventually would become Reynols, a name loosely inspired by Burt Reynolds.After giving Mr. Tomasín some drumming lessons, they decided to bring him into the band. Their collaboration, however, got off to an uncertain start.Mr. Tomasín in the dining room at his brother’s home in Rio Gallegos, Argentina.Mr. Tomasín with his brother, Juan Mario Tomasín, and a neighborhood dog on the banks of the Rio Gallegos River.During one of their first shows, in 1994, a crowd of high school students broke into a mosh pit, which Mr. Courtis and Roberto Conlazo stoked by spraying deodorant into the audience’s faces, pulling out guitar strings with pincers and emitting bloodcurdling noise from primitive loudspeakers.When Mr. Tomasín’s father, Jorge Tomasín, approached the band after the show, they were resigned to never seeing Miguel again, sure his father would disapprove.“‘Lads, I didn’t understand a lot of what you played,” Roberto Conlazo recalled the father saying, “‘but I saw Miguel very happy. So go right ahead.’”Those words were a green light for the ensuing three decades of creativity that has produced around 120 albums, American and European tours, and collaborations with some of the world’s most respected experimental musicians. Reynols splits proceeds from shows and music sales equally, making Mr. Tomasín one of the few professional musicians with Down syndrome in the world.The band first came to broad national attention with the afternoon TV gig. A popular host, Dr. Mario Socolinsky, had interviewed Reynols on his daytime program, “Good Afternoon Health,” in which he gave health tips. Impressed with Mr. Tomasín’s integration into the band, he invited them to be the show’s house musicians, giving Reynols an unlikely job of playing to a mainstream audience five times a week for a year.Reynols’s next break came in 2001, when Mr. Courtis and Roberto Conlazo went on the band’s first U.S. tour. Although Mr. Tomasín decided not to join them, the tour introduced his work to the global underground music network that has supported the band’s subsequent career.Mr. Tomasín playing guitar during a concert.Juan Mario Tomasín, left, Miguel’s brother, and his bandmate Patricio Conlazo after a rehearsal.In the following years, the band’s focus on improvisation drove its extraordinary output of albums. Because each jam session with Mr. Tomasín could result in a different sound, the band has released dozens of them as albums on small record labels in runs of a few hundred copies.After seeing Mr. Tomasín’s performance on TV, families across Argentina started contacting the band, asking them to teach music to their children with disabilities. That led Mr. Courtis and Roberto and Patricio Conlazo to create a collective, called Sol Mayor, which brought together people with various physical and developmental disabilities to play music.Their approach, they believe, puts a spotlight on the beauty of music that does not follow Western norms, like playing in an octave scale.Inspired by work with Reynols, other musicians have started bands for people with disabilities in Norway and France.“We make music so that people enjoy it,” Mr. Tomasín said. Music is “the best, magical,” he added.Mr. Tomasín in his bedroom at his brother’s family home in Rio Gallegos.Mr. Tomasín’s family say they were able to give him the support to develop his creativity thanks in part to their relatively well-off economic position, acknowledging the social inequalities that prevent many people with disabilities from reaching their potential.At a recent sold-out Reynols concert in Buenos Aires, Mr. Tomasín sang and played all the instruments on the stage in front of 600 fans, posing for selfies with admirers after the show.Earlier this year, Mr. Tomasín moved from Buenos Aires to Rio Gallegos to live with his brother Juan Mario, a former Army officer who now teaches English. In the afternoons, Mr. Tomasín dances to Argentine folk music, cooks and gardens at a local center for people with disabilities, often wearing his favorite Reynols T-shirt.Mr. Tomasín’s bandmates say one of his greatest gifts is helping people become better versions of themselves without even being aware of his influence.“He teaches without teaching, by simply enjoying his life,” Roberto Conlazo said.Mr. Tomasín’s big plan for the near future is to stage a concert in his new town, bringing his bandmates from Buenos Aires, 1,600 miles away, and inviting his new friends.“Let them come to my school,” he said, “so we can all play together.”Mr. Tomasín participating in a folk dance class at the René Vargas Day Center in Rio Gallegos.Hisako Ueno More

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      in Theater

      In ‘Corsicana,’ Will Arbery Puts Art, Family and Down Syndrome Onstage

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      Arbery, a Pulitzer finalist in 2020, is back with a play inspired by his relationship with his sister. But don’t call it an “issue” play.In 2019, Will Arbery scored an unlikely hit with “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” his darkly comic, boundary-pushing play about young Catholic conservatives debating God, love, friendship and Donald Trump at a late-night party in a Wyoming backyard. A finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, it won praise both from the heavily liberal New York theater world and from traditionalist Christians who often feel caricatured by it, if they are depicted at all.“Heroes” was a play that, for all the idiosyncrasies of its characters, was hailed as being very much About Something. But on a recent morning, Arbery, 32, was sitting outside a cafe near his apartment in Brooklyn, alternately wrestling with and resisting the question of just what his new play, “Corsicana,” was about.Most simply, “Corsicana,” which runs until July 10 at Playwrights Horizons, is about four people in that small city in Texas, including a young woman with Down syndrome, her aspiring filmmaker brother and a reclusive self-taught artist who comes into their orbit. Inspired by Arbery’s relationship with his older sister Julia, it’s the rare play to feature both a lead character — and a lead actor — with Down syndrome.But it’s also, Arbery said, a play that “very stubbornly defies about-ness.”Will Dagger, left, in “Corsicana” with Deirdre O’Connell, center, and Jamie Brewer. The play, Arbery said, “very stubbornly defies about-ness.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“When you first walk in, you might say oh, this is a couch play, or an artist-on-the-edge-of-town play, or a Down syndrome play,” he said. “But it’s more of an accumulation. It’s not like any of those things are false — they’re all there — but something else is operating that can’t be named.”The goal, he said, was a “widening complexity.” If audiences could “categorize the play too easily, then they could categorize Julia too easily,” he said. “And that’s the opposite of what I want to do.”“Corsicana,” directed by Sam Gold at the same theater that first staged “Heroes,” is something of a homecoming for Arbery, who since 2019 has been living the life of a hot young playwright. There have been multiple productions around the world of “Heroes” and his previous play, “Plano,” also inspired by his family. Another play, “Evanston Salt Costs Climbing,” from 2018, will have its New York premiere in the fall with the New Group. And Hollywood has been calling. In February 2020, he spent a month in London consulting on HBO’s “Succession,” immersing himself in the acid-bath dynamics of a very different clan.“I just sat there and made a vow to myself to say at least one thing a day,” he said of the writers room. “It was an intimidatingly brilliant and funny group of people.” (Evidently, he passed muster. He recently wrapped work on Season 4, on which he’s credited as a co-producer.)“Corsicana,” which Arbery started before the pandemic, was inspired in part by an artists residency in the same small Texas city as the play is set. But it’s also, as he puts it, a play he has been writing his whole life.Arbery, who grew up in Dallas with seven sisters in a conservative Catholic milieu similar to that of “Heroes,” had always wanted to write a play about his relationship with Julia, who is two years older (as she likes to remind him). But he didn’t want to write, as he puts it, an “issue play.”“I wanted to do it in the way it felt like growing up,” he said, where Julia “was just part of the fabric of daily life, a member of the family and the team.”Julia Arbery, shown with Will in 2016, said they have always been able to talk “about our feelings, excitement, sadness” and “about our hearts.”via Will ArberyIn “Corsicana,” the young filmmaker, Christopher (Will Dagger), has put aside his own ambitions to come home and live with his sister Ginny (Jamie Brewer) after their mother’s death. Through their mother’s best friend (Deirdre O’Connell, a 2022 Tony winner for “Dana H”), Christopher arranges for Ginny to spend time with Lot (Harold Surratt), a reclusive self-taught artist who makes kaleidoscopic sculptures out of junk, and who bristles at the idea that people might see him, like Ginny, as “special.”Lot also makes tapes of his strange, homespun songs (reminiscent of the “outsider” Texas songwriter Daniel Johnston). The hope is that he and Ginny — whose tastes run more to Whitney Houston, Hilary Duff and the Chicks — will write a song together, to pull her out of her funk.“Corsicana” explores art, grief, privacy, gifts, family and community, and how the meanings of creative acts change depending on who witnesses them — and whether some things should have an audience at all. There are pop-culture one-liners and bigger philosophical talk, along with surreal riffs on dinosaurs, ghosts, history and books that never get read.Arbery described Julia, an ardent music fan who sings with a choir, as “a natural performer.” But like Lot in the play (whose work we never see), he said, she does much of her creation in her room, for “an audience of no one.”“If you’re lucky to walk by and the door’s ajar and you see her busting these moves that are just unbelievable,” he said. “I felt like that’s the most honest place to write from, outside that door, and having the audience outside too, but with the terms clearly set — you’re not allowed to look back there.”If Ginny mostly sings behind closed doors, Jamie Brewer, the actress who plays her, is a seasoned professional. Brewer, who has performed since she was a child, has appeared in several seasons of “American Horror Story.” In 2018, she became what is believed to be the first actor with Down syndrome to play the lead in a Broadway or Off Broadway play, in Lindsey Ferrentino’s “Amy and the Orphans.”“Amy” was about a group of siblings learning the fuller story of their sister, who had been institutionalized as a child and neglected by the family. “Corsicana,” which Brewer described as much “wordier” than “Amy,” offers a different window on the experience of living with Down syndrome, depicting Christopher and Ginny’s relationship as emotionally equal and ordinary, down to their private jokes and fights.“I love being part of a play that shows everyone who we are,” Brewer, 37, said in a video interview. “We’re all the same as everyone — we have the same wants and needs, the drive, the desire, the individual sense of self.”Julia Arbery in “Your Resources,” a 2016 short film by Will Arbery. The film “is a little embarrassing,” Will said. But Julia “is really good.”Will Arbery Julia Arbery, who turns 35 in July, lives with her parents in Wyoming, and works in the dining hall at Wyoming Catholic College, a small conservative liberal arts institution where their father, Glenn, is president, and their mother, Virginia, teaches political science.In a joint video interview with Will, Julia described him as “my favorite brother,” which wasn’t the only time they cracked each other up. (He’s her only brother.) She said they have always been able to talk “about our feelings, excitement, sadness” and “about our hearts.”Julia was about to make her first trip to New York, to see “Corsicana” — the first time she’s seen a professional production of one of his plays. Julia, a country music fan who used to sing in a choir, doesn’t know many details of the play. But she said she was especially excited to hear Ginny and Lot’s song (co-written by Arbery and the indie musician and artist Joanna Sternberg).There’s a scene in the play where Christopher, the would-be hipster auteur, asks Ginny (a “High School Musical” fan) if she wants to be in one of his movies. “Is it going to be good?” she shoots back. (So much of “Corsicana,” Arbery said, “is a tug of war about taste.”)In real life, Julia has acted in some of her brother’s short films, including the sci-fi-tinged “Your Resources,” shot in 2016 at their parents’ ranch-like home, starring Julia as a young woman who enters a contest to win a brain implant developed by a sinister futuristic corporation, so she can be “different” and help her ailing father (played by Glenn Arbery).“The short film is a little embarrassing,” Will said later by email. But “Julia is really good.”They have also been talking about making a hybrid documentary-feature, about Will filming Julia directing a mash-up of “The Princess Bride” (one of their favorites) and Liam Neeson’s “Taken.”Julia, he said, inspired not just this play, but his approach to writing.“From a very young age, she keyed me into this idea that a way a person uses language is a fingerprint,” he said. “It always felt very clear to me that she was the reason I was doing some of this.” More