Anne Gridley’s favorite neurologist has told her that people can only concentrate on walking for about eight seconds; human beings are designed to walk without thinking about it. But her play asks the audience to spend nearly two hours thinking about her walking. Gridley hobbles, accompanied by one of twenty walking sticks (“I’m the Imelda Marcos of mobility aids.”) She has a disease called Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia, or HSP, the same one her mother and grandmother had; it didn’t affect her until she was in her thirties.
Gridley is one of the founding members of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, a 20-year-old performance art group based in New York whose inventive antics (in such works as Pursuit of Happiness) are a natural fit for an experimental theater festival like Under the Radar. Similarly, there are many moments of humor and ingenuity in “Watch Me Walk,” a SoHo Rep production running through February 8 at Playwrights Horizons as part of this year’s festival. But Gridley’s play is also at times dark, at other times didactic. She deliberately aims to make her audience uneasy, to make a point.
True to the play’s title, we watch Gridley walk, back and forth and back and forth across the stage, for an uncomfortably long time – as if to say: Get over it.
Later, she climbs a ladder and sings “And now I’m on a ladder and it’s making you feel nervous. And yes, that is the point.”
At another point, she falls down, on purpose.
“Ask me if I need help.”
The audience asks.
“No,” she replies.
This, she had informed us, was practice for us: “Be careful when ‘helping’ a gimp. Many well-intentioned people exist, but you know what they say about good intentions. The best practice is to ASK if the person needs help, and ACCEPT NO as a possible answer.”
She gives numerous examples of the ignorant, insensitive things that people , including medical professionals, have said to her.
She describes and defines her condition at length, using projections of the medical terms involved.
There is plenty of playfulness mixed in with the pedantry and polemics. There is some lively choreography by Asli Bulbul, for which Gridley enlists as dance partners two muscular men who are first dressed in tennis outfits (Alex Gibson and Keith Johnson), both of whom she calls Adonis. She shows pictures of her walking sticks as she tells us the names of each one (from Dorothy Parker to Minnesota Fats.) At one point, she dresses colorfully as Dumn Dumn, a “Degenerating Upper Motor Neuron,” and, at another, as Little Orphan Annie, singing an original song with the refrain “I’m just an orphan with an orphan disease” – both because both of her parents are dead, and because HSP is an orphan disease, meaning it affects too few people for drug companies to consider it profitable enough to develop treatments or look for a cure.
There is also straightforward politics. She inveighs (briefly) against health insurance companies, punctuating it with “Viva Luigi!”Gibson leads the audience in a refrain of “Ha ha ha ha ha” in a song that chronicles the ugly treatment of the disabled throughout world history. One of the most arresting examples: “In 1867, the first “ugly law” passed in San Francisco making it a crime for “any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object” to expose themself to “public view.” Chicago, Reno, Portland, New Orleans, and the entire state of Pennsylvania quickly followed.”
It would be difficult to find any New York theatergoer who would disagree with Gridley politically. But “Watch Me Walk” made me uncomfortable in a way she did not intend. The play begins with an extensive recording between Gridley’s mother and Pavol Liška, the co-artistic director of National Theater of Oklahoma, audio that is presented completely in the dark, with no captions. “Watch Me Walk” is in sharp contrast to the plays written and performed by Ryan Haddad, who has cerebral palsy. In such productions as “Dark, Disabled Stories” and “Hold Me In The Water,” Haddad made a point of fully integrating open captions, audio description, ASL interpretation at every single performance. Gridley and director Eric Ting seem to presume that their audience will all be able-bodied, all in need of instruction, none in need of access. There is little obvious effort to encourage those with similar experiences as Gridley’s to attend (no mention of services for the Deaf or disabled on the show’s website, for example.)
There are scenes in Gridley’s play that touch on her personal biography and that of her family, much of it sad or outright tragic, which are not given the same weight as this late-onset disease that she tells us affects only her legs, is not painful, nor will it shorten her life, although it may sooner or later require her to use a wheelchair, if its progression is the same as it was with her mother.There is virtually nothing in the play about her work as a theater artist, nor the way her life and struggles affected her art, and vice-versa. If she gets to do another production of “Watch Me Walk” — and I hope she does — I would love to watch her walk us through a life presented more fully, in a more clearly accessible way.
