Work Worth Doing

Every play worth doing carries complex conversations. The Curious Incident is a beautiful play that resonates with people across the globe and carries a really difficult history of misrepresentation and disregard for people with disabilities– particularly autistic people– from which the neurotypical, able-bodied writers benefit. I stepped into this project with full awareness of this problematic weight because I believe that through that challenge is work worth doing.

I think I am quoting Leslie Knope quoting Theodore Roosevelt in saying: “the best prize life has to offer is a chance to work hard at work worth doing.” I am learning that often, work worth doing, specifically creative and artistic work, brings both passion and opposition. One of the greatest joys of creating art is seeing the immense passion people bring to it and the positive reactions it provokes. And one of the greatest challenges when there is opposition to the work as a whole. 

But work can be made more whole when it carries both its support and its criticism into and throughout its process, and that is something I committed to doing.

In The Curious Incident, Christopher, the protagonist, is scripted as a compilation of autistic stereotypes that, when not understood and seen as a dimensional, complex character, can cause him to be performed as a manifestation of an ableist view of autism specifically associated with a lack of emotional comprehension and violent tendencies. Additionally, a large part of the success of this production, particularly in its original and touring forms, came from its unique technical work with lights, music, and projections. While these are pieces of art in themselves and appealing to many artists and audience goers alike, they can be incredibly inaccessible to the very people they attempt to represent. 

And I believe that one of the best parts of art is that there is always a way to do it differently, learn from others’ mistakes, and try to do it better, making this work worth doing.

From the beginning of my proposal process, accessibility and inclusivity have been key components of this project. My ultimate goal is to create a process and a final product that are both accessible experiences in themselves and become models for other theaters to take bigger steps towards a higher standard of accessibility and inclusivity from their auditions through their performances. 

While it sometimes leaves my stage manager and me inundated with meetings, one of the most incredible parts of this process has been being in conversation with over 70 people to date, each with their own approaches to this project and to the world as a whole. It has been a project in itself to connect with so many students and community members of so many abilities, disabilities, and lived experiences, and it has undoubtedly been work worth doing. At the core of this project are the people. 

As a director, knowing that everyone has obstacles in their way and methods in which they work best, my priority is to find the best ways to support people in our approach to everything we do, from how we organized auditions to the way we run meetings and rehearsals and conversations with our team members. As a director, it is my job to adapt my work to support each of those strengths and struggles, not to ask all our team members to fit into the same mold of socially expected learning and communication styles and abilities. As a director, my work is centered around the question of how can I best support the people I work with?, learning the answers through the process of working with people and explicitly asking our team members what we can do to best support them. It is an open channel of communication, with all parties understanding that if, at any point in the process, we are not supporting them in the best possible way, that is reason to stop, reevaluate, and try to do better. We strive for every person we interact with to have equal opportunity and access to have their voice heard in our space, whether they are looking to join the team, partner with their organization, voice a concern, or simply learn more about our work.

Throughout the semester, this blog will serve as a platform for artists of all abilities– within our own team and who we bring into our space– to share their stories with disabilities, with this project, and/or with our process. It will also continue to be a space for me to keep our greater community in the loop with our work– both what we would normally share with the public and what typically happens behind the scenes.

Future blog posts from me and my team members will discuss Universal Design and its significant influence on this project; how we are structuring our production meetings to be engaging, educating, and collaborative spaces; how we ran auditions and on-boarded our cast in such a way that provided everyone with space to voice their needs and ways for us to best support them; the work we are doing with our full team to connect with the greater disabled community; our community outreach work focusing on bringing the community into our work and our work into the community within and beyond Wesleyan; my own research on physical contact and social improvisation as pillars of ableist urban design; as well as my research on accessible performing arts spaces and how to best support people of all abilities on the journey from arrival, through the performance, and until their departure; and so much more we haven’t even discovered yet. 

There’s a lot of ground to cover and a lot I want to share with the community because there is a lot of work worth doing with a lot of people worth working with. Please feel free to reach out to us if you are interested in being a part of our team, contributing your story to our blog, or have general thoughts you’d like to share; we’d always love to find a time to talk with you.

This project is our platform. It is imperfect, particularly in its history, and we are using that history as something that propels us to work harder and smarter and better because this is work worth doing. What is the alternative? That we don’t take the time to educate ourselves and our community on accessibility and the lived experiences of people with disabilities? That we don’t fight the ableist structures many of us battle on a daily basis? Or that we don’t create supportive space for our team members with a wide variety of disabilities and neurodivergences to explore their own experiences as something that is essential to the way they see and approach the world? 

So yes, our platform has a difficult history, it is far from perfect, and it is our platform for really important work: for work truly worth doing. 

Written by Lauren Stock. At the time this was written, Lauren (she/her) was a senior theater and sociology major at Wesleyan University from Dallas, TX. She was the Director and Thesis Writer for The Curious Incident. 

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: On top of a blue striped placemat, there is a stack of books: Building Access, Access for Disabled People to Arts Premises, Deaf and Disability Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Accessible America, Extraordinary Bodies, The Environment and Social Behavior, Choreographing Difference, Brilliant Imperfection, Cost of Living, and Disability Visibility on top. On the right side of the stack is a copy of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time book as well as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time play script. On the cover of the play, there is a large title and a boy in a blue jacket and khaki pants lying upside down.]