Something strange happens when actors Madison Ferris and Danny J. Gomez are together in public, using mobility devices to get around: she a scooter, he a wheelchair. Inevitably, she said, strangers approach, assuming that the two are somehow in danger.
“People will say, ‘Are you okay? What’s going on?’” Ferris said the other afternoon at the Pershing Square Signature Center in Manhattan, where they star in the New groupIt is an off-Broadway production of Laura Winters’ romantic comedy, “All of Me.”
And if several wheelchair users roll down the street together, Gómez said, “then it’s like the circus is in town.” Like the night some friends of his from the Los Angeles dance team the rollettes He arrived at the site and he and Ferris left with them afterwards.
“Everywhere we went,” he said, “just stares, left and right.”
For Gómez, who was paralyzed from the waist down in a mountain bike accident in 2016, that kind of otherness underscores the need for theater, television and film to represent more disabled people and do so in a more natural way.
“Then it wouldn’t be so strange in real life,” he added. “They would simply be people who would continue with their daily lives. For example, I don’t stare at you when you’re with your group of friends.”
Not that “All of Me” is intended to be pedagogical, but he thinks it could help.
The play begins with a cute encounter between Lucy, played by Ferris, and Alfonso, played by Gómez, outside a hospital. Unlike the actors who play them, the characters rely on electronic text-to-speech devices to speak: sardonic Lucy because her muscles have recently made it difficult for her to enunciate, funny Alfonso because his vocal cords were damaged when he was a baby. . Lucy’s jokes immediately give the audience permission to laugh.
The show’s comedy is largely physical. There are nuances in Lucy and Alfonso’s faces and posture, and in the positions of their scooter and wheelchair. In his review of “All of Me” for The New York Times, Naveen Kumar attributed “much of his earnest appeal to his two leads,” praising Ferris’s dexterity and Gomez’s charm.
“All of Me,” which runs through June 16, entered Ferris’s life in 2017, when she was playing Laura in Sam Gold’s Broadway revival of “The Glass Menagerie.” That show’s assistant director, Ashley Brooke Monroe, who is the director of “All of Me,” suggested her to Winters.
For Ferris, that spring was a time of disappointment. Gold’s production, starring Sally Field as Amanda and Joe Mantello as Tom, was not well received and closed early.
“I had imagined the world would be much more progressive,” Ferris said. “And then when I did ‘The Glass Menagerie,’ I realized it wasn’t. Much of the feedback that I didn’t receive personally, but that was written about me, was entirely about the way I moved and my physique. And it wasn’t about the fact that I had put my heart and soul into this character.”
In the years since, New York stages have seen a rise in high-profile performances by disabled actors, such as Ali Stroker, who won a Tony Award in 2019 as Ado Annie in “Oklahoma!” by Daniel Fish; Katy Sullivan and Gregg Mozgala in the Broadway production of “Cost of Living” in 2022; Michael Patrick Thornton, who played Dr. Rank in Jamie Lloyd’s “A Doll’s House” last spring; Ryan J. Haddad, winner of the 2024 Obie Award for his “Dark Disabled Stories”; and Jenna Bainbridge, a accessibility consultant in “All of Me,” currently on Broadway in “Suffs.”
“Little by little,” Ferris said, “the tide is turning.”
It might spin faster if not for what Monroe suggested is a misperception by producers that plays involving actors with disabilities are “incredibly expensive” or logistically complex to stage.
“I know for a fact that it’s not as hard as people think,” he said.
Still, he noted, everything is easier in a contemporary facility like the Signature Center, designed with accessibility for artists and the public in mind.
“All of Me” will premiere in 2022 in Barrington Performing Company, in western Massachusetts. Gómez had joined the project in 2019, two years after Ferris.
During the show’s incubation, the cultural debate over who has the right to portray what types of characters has only intensified. Winters, whose initial inspiration for writing about disability in “All of Me” was the memory of watching her grandmother lose mobility, is not disabled.
As far as Ferris is concerned, that doesn’t mean Winters is out of line having imagined Lucy and Alfonso’s lives.
“If someone said that to Laura, she’d probably beat them up,” Ferris reflected grimly. “I would probably hit them with my scooter.”
For one thing, she said, Winters listened to her and Gomez and rewrote the script to make it closer to the actors’ experiences. On the other hand, Winters and Monroe, who is also disabled, recruited experts as consultants and hired disabled people behind the scenes.
Winters acknowledged that he had sometimes felt nervous writing disabled characters. But he has rooted them in family relationships; most significant is Lucy’s tense dynamic with her mother, played by Kyra Sedgwick.
“I know how to write about families,” Winters said, “and I know how to write about sisters, and I know how to write about lovers, and I know how to write about people on a date. And all these other things that people with disabilities are doing with their lives too.”
Both Ferris and Gomez are hungry to play characters who are simply out there in the world, whether they’re written as disabled or not.
Ferris has a whole list of dream roles, starting with Jean in Sarah Ruhl’s comedy “Dead Man’s Cell Phone,” the role Mary-Louise Parker played Off Broadway in 2008. Also Catherine Sloper in the stage version of “The “Heiress”; Natasha in “Three Sisters”; Stella in “A Streetcar Named Desire”; Gwendolen in “The Importance of Being Serious”; and Lady Macbeth: “obviously,” she said.
But above all, Ferris, who dismissed many depictions of disability as “a rumor,” would like to continue making comedies, on stage and screen.
And Gómez, mainly a film actor, would like to work constantly. Therefore, it would be helpful if writers stopped worrying about disability.
“The first thing I hear from writers in Los Angeles,” he said, “is like, ‘Well, how do I explain why you’re in a wheelchair?’ I say, ‘Nobody cares.'”
“If you don’t mention it,” he added, “or you just write, ‘The man works in a coffee shop, serves coffee,’ that’s it. Then you can continue with your story.”
