“Do you want to play a game? “ Lucy (Madison Ferris) asks Alfonso as soon as she spots him, without even so much as a hello. “It’ll be fun, trust me.”

“A stranger who says I should trust them,” replies Alfonso (Danny J. Gomez) drily. “How trustworthy.”

And so begins “All of Me,” which is three shows all in one — a romantic comedy, a family drama, and several lessons about living with a disability (not all of the lessons intentional.)  Lucy and Alfonso both happen to be in the parking lot of Ellis Hospital in Schenectady New York waiting for a ride home, he in his motorized wheelchair, she in her scooter. Their voices are digital; they each use text-to-speech devices. The game Lucy proposes, as she explains it, “is picking a song that will be most butchered by this fucking Stephen Hawking robot voice.” 

That first scene, which begins with her flirting with him and ends with his asking her on a date, suggests the spark that will draw them together. Soon afterward, we learn what will break them apart – temporarily (which is a spoiler only if you’ve never before seen a romantic comedy.)

Lucy, who was a promising jazz singer as a teenager, has a degenerative neurological disease that began during high school, to which half a dozen years later neither she nor her family have fully adjusted. This is especially true of her mother Connie (Kyra Sedgwick), a religious woman who believes that prayer and physical therapy exercises will bring Lucy back to the way she was. Connie is even in denial about her own chronic back pain, refusing to use the cane she needs. They live together in an inadequately accessible house with Lucy’s older sister Jackie and Jackie’s poker-playing boyfriend Moose (Brian Furey Morabito). Lucy is on disability, Connie is a struggling single mother ( her husband an addict who abandoned the family.) She works ten hours a day in a salon, and tries to sell knives as a side gig, but the family must largely do without.

By contrast, Alfonso, whose disability occurred in infancy, is a fully adjusted, well-educated, scientific researcher who has moved from Manhattan for a job with the county Public Health Service. He is the son of an investment banker father and a lawyer mother, Elena (Florencia Lozano) who is only in Schenectady to help him with the building of his (fancy, fully accessible) new home.  If that weren’t contrast enough, she’s an elegant immigrant from Argentina.  

So race and class help explain the tensions between the two would-be lovers and their families, but it’s mostly the differing attitudes toward their disabilities.  Connie can’t see a future for Lucy beyond being a greeter at Walmart. Alfonso sees a more expansive future for Lucy, which will include him. Lucy vacillates.

There is wit in Laura Winters’ script, and charm in the performances. That Lucy and her sister Jackie have a background as jazz singers even gives the production an excuse to play romantic jazz standards such as the title song. There is, above all, an obvious effort in a myriad of entertaining ways to make points – to score points – on behalf of the disabled. A vivid example occurs when Alfonso tries to pay Lucy a visit at her house, but her door is too narrow for him to enter; they wind up having a sort of across-the-threshold text-to-speech phone sex that Connie eventually overhears. The scene adeptly combines sexiness and comic mayhem, while illustrating that people with disabilities have both unique challenges and everyday desires.

The two actors portraying the romantic leads both themselves use wheelchairs (though not in real life text-to-voice devices). The production hired both an Accessibility & Disability Consultant and a Production Accessibility Coordinator. There was an ASL-interpreted performance, and will be open caption nights. They even handed out an Accessibility Resources Guide to journalists and critics with such advice as: “Refrain from framing the romance of the play as inspiring or referring to characters ‘overcoming their disabilities to fall in love’ and other language of this type. The idea of disabled people being inspiring for having everyday experiences is a trope called inspiration porn and is patronizing.”

There are other plays that have focused on the disabled and/or their caregivers – Martyna Majok’s “Cost of Living,” Amy Herzog’s “Mary Jane” and  Jackie Sibblies Drury’s  “Marys Seacole” come to mind – and another recent play even relies (almost exclusively) on text-to-voice technology (Mona Pirnot’s “I Love You So Much I Could Die.”) If I had seen “All of Me” fifteen months ago, I might have considered the production incomparable in its thoughtfulness about the disabled both onstage and off. But I’ve since seen Ryan J. Haddad’s  “Dark, Disabled Stories.” which both set the gold standard and created something of a dare for all shows to follow, because disability was fully incorporated in all aspects of the shows; it was not just about people with disabilities, it was by the disabled, and for people with disabilities. This is to say: Every performance was captioned, every performance was audio described, every performance was sign interpreted. This is not true about “All of Me.”

I’m not the only one who would argue that every show should be completely accessible in this way, not just shows that present characters (or performers) with disabilities. But, at a time when any show that features the disabled will likely be an automatic turnoff for some segment of the theatergoing public no matter how entertaining you tell them it is, it just makes practical sense for a show like “All of Me” to do all that it possibly can to welcome all of us.

All of Me
New Group at Signature Center through June 16
Running time: Two hours ten minutes, including one intermission
Tickets: $29 – $89
Written by Laura Winters
Directed by Ashley Brooke Monroe
Cast: Madison Ferris as Lucy, Danny J. Gomez as Alfonso, Lily Mae Harrington as Jackie, Florencia Lozano as Elena, Brian Morabito as Moose and Kyra Sedgwick as Connie.  
Co-Scenic Design by Brett Banakis and Edward T. Morris, Costume Design by Sarah LeFeber, Lighting Design by Reza Behjat and Sound Design by Matt Otto.  Fight Director: Thomas Schall.  Production Supervisor: Five Ohm.  Accessibility & Disability Consultant: ConsultAbility.  Production Accessibility Coordinator: Caitlin Cafiero