Created and performed by a trio who call themselves FlawBored and describe themselves as a “disability-led theater company” – two of the three are legally blind – this export from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is a morass of contradictions, most of them deliberate.
Samuel Brewer, Aarian Mehrabani, and Chloe Palmer spend most of the seventy minutes of their show, both as characters in a convoluted satire and as themselves, making comic hay out of the efforts of the non-disabled to be sensitive to the disabled, and to make things accessible for them. Yet the show features both captioning and audio description, and they call out those who discriminate against the disabled: “Ableism is real,” Brewer says. The ableists, however, include themselves: SoHo Playhouse, the theater where they’re performing, doesn’t have a wheelchair ramp, “but we really wanted to come to New York,” Brewer adds, “so we weren’t going to let the rights of other disabled people get in our way.”
The show has a crude title that has no discernible connection to its contents, and they certainly make jokes that might offend a range of marginalized communities, not just the disabled. But there are also some seriously thought-provoking moments in the show, and the performers work at being, as Palmer admits, “charmingly European,” which she says makes them much more likely to get a review in the New York Times.
The plot of the story they tell (when they finally get around to it after many mostly mock-serious announcements of their efforts at being accessible) is so fragmented and fanciful that it’s not worth describing in much detail: A PR firm decides to try to make disability the latest trend, which includes a book called “We Should All Be Blind,” a “Revision” dating app that features no photos so you’re no longer “visually judged,” and “Revision Experiences,” a week-long adventure of not seeing: “ Feel the harsh wind of ableism. Experience a daily micro-aggression. Join the fight for your rights to access. Imagine if you too could get that seat on the train.”
But then they interrupt their play, and address us sincerely.
“This show is a joke,” Mehrabani begins. “You can debate how funny the joke is, but it’s a joke. We’re poking fun at the mass marketing of identity.”
“So,” Palmer continues, “we got to have loads of fun writing a bunch of ludicrous stuff that could never happen.”
“Stuff that could never happen,” Brewer underscores.
But after they finished writing the play, they say, they came across an actual service called “Dialogue in the Dark,” which is described on its website as “one of the world’s most exciting life-changing experiences where visitors are guided by blind guides in absolute darkness.”
The trio looks grim: “Do you know how demoralizing it is when you’re out satire-ed by real life?”
On the other hand, shortly afterwards, they are back in character and telling us that Eddie Redmayne has been cast as Louis Braille for a movie scheduled for release in 2027.
“What do we do here?” one of the activist characters says. “Are we trying to cancel him, or are we giving him an olive branch?”
“Isn’t he too big to cancel? I mean he survived The Danish Girl.”
I couldn’t find mention of this casting online; what I did find is that Redmayne is color blind. So, was this some kind of inside joke, or were they being — deliberately or unknowingly — insensitive?
IAMFP (as I prefer to call it) is at SoHo Playhouse through January 21, as part of the International Fringe Encore Play Series.
