Monroe, Ashley Brooke

Subterms

    Latest story

    138 Shares149 Views

    What if the Disabled Characters Were Just Going About Their Day?

    by

    Madison Ferris and Danny J. Gomez star in the meet-cute “All of Me” — proof that depictions of disability onstage don’t have to be “a buzz kill,” as Ferris puts it.A bizarre thing happens when the actors Madison Ferris and Danny J. Gomez are out and about in public together, using mobility aids to get around: she a scooter, he a wheelchair. Inevitably, she said, strangers approach, presuming that the two are somehow in distress.“People will be like, ‘Are you OK? What’s going on?’” Ferris said the other afternoon at the Pershing Square Signature Center in Manhattan, where they are starring in the New Group’s Off Broadway production of Laura Winters’s romantic comedy, “All of Me.”And if several wheelchair users should roll down the street together, Gomez said, “then it’s like the circus is in town.” Such as the night a few friends of his from the Los Angeles dance team the Rollettes came to the play, and he and Ferris left with them afterward.“Everywhere we went,” he said, “just stares, left and right.”To Gomez, who was paralyzed from the waist down in a mountain-biking accident in 2016, that kind of othering underscores the need for theater, television and film to depict more disabled people, and do it more matter-of-factly.“Then it wouldn’t be so weird in real life,” he added. “It would just be people going about their day. Like, I don’t stare at you when you’re with your group of friends.”Not that “All of Me” is intended as pedagogical, but he does think it could help.In “All of Me,” Ferris and Gomez play characters who rely on electronic text-to-speech devices to talk. Kyra Sedgwick, left, plays Ferris’s mother.Richard Termine for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Review: A Text-to-Speech Meet-Cute in ‘All of Me’

      by

      Laura Winters’s romantic comedy pays careful attention to the dynamics of living with disabilities.Lucy has impeccable comic timing and a sense of humor as dry as a gin martini. Her expression deadpan but for a slightly furrowed brow, she delivers punchlines with Amazon Prime efficiency in a calm, even tone that may sound familiar to people who use Alexa or ride the New York City subway.Played with wry assurance by Madison Ferris, Lucy communicates using a text-to-speech tool built into her motorized scooter. As heroines go, she is a young Katharine Hepburn type: headstrong and outspoken but eagerly in search of tenderness. Her verve and vulnerability are the lifeblood of “All of Me,” an affecting if formulaic new romantic comedy by Laura Winters that opened on Tuesday at the Pershing Square Signature Center.Lucy meets Alfonso (Danny J. Gomez), who uses a motorized wheelchair and similar technology to communicate, outside a hospital while awaiting their rides. Proposing a game, Lucy asks him to pick a random key on his screen; when he chooses “B,” there’s a prolonged pause while she types. Then her device’s flat staccato sounds out the raunchy rhymes of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.”Typical of Lucy, it’s a funny bit with a mordant edge, bemoaning her situation by making light of it. As we soon learn, Lucy used to love to sing but has lost the ability to pronounce consonants (the play’s title refers to the jazz standard by Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons). Lucy received a diagnosis of muscular dystrophy when she was 16; now in her early 20s, she has been managing the disease long enough to laugh about it with a trace of cynicism.Where Lucy sees only limitations, Alfonso, who has been paralyzed since infancy, maintains a broader sense of life’s possibilities — largely because he has the money to. So, what follows is a classic case of opposites attract. Lucy shares a cramped, less-than-accessible home with her mother, Connie (Kyra Sedgwick), who works two jobs; her older sister, Jackie (Lily Mae Harrington); and Jackie’s fiancé, Moose (Brian Furey Morabito).Alfonso, on the other hand, is a white-collar professional with enough means to hire help and buy a tricked-out house (the furniture-swapping set is by Brett Banakis and Edward T. Morris); his mother, Elena (Florencia Lozano), is only in town to help with the move (the story takes place in Schenectady, N.Y. in 2018).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More