The First Double Helix Felix!

This year, Extreme Kids & Crew is honoring Sam Gold and Amy Herzog with our first Double Helix Felix. Everyone knows who Felix is (if you don’t, you can read about him here), but why a Double Helix, other than the niftiness of the rhyme?

As we’ve learned from countless detective shows, we are identified by our DNA. By and large, our cells are guided by the same instructions for growth and propagation as everyone else’s, but there are tiny differences in pattern and expression that make you you and me me and the magnolia tree in my back yard exactly that magnolia and none other. The similarities of our collective DNA speak to the connectivity of all life, while the differences help define and record the uniqueness of each individual. Celebrating uniqueness and commonality is what Extreme Kids & Crew is all about, so it makes sense to invoke this mother of all molecules in our awards. But I wouldn’t have thought of the double helix were it not for the doubleness of our honorees. Amy and Sam are both recognized for their significant contributions to theater: Gold won a Tony for his direction of Fun Home and Herzog’s 4000 Miles won an Obie for best new American play. They are married, and the parents of two young girls, 2 and 5 years old. They allow me to see a double helix somewhat removed from biology. Picture instead a twisted ladder, the sides the parents, holding and being bound by the rungs, which are the children and perhaps their careers in the theater, and all of these elements are in motion, spiraling around, together.

Herzog and Gold’s family has been given a further twist due to the DNA of their firstborn.  The instructions for her cells include a rare genetic pattern known as nemaline myopathy. This means that she lives with significant physical disabilities. I met her a few months ago when her family came to visit an Extreme Kids’s playspace in a public school in Red Hook. I am proud of our playspace and was trying to show it off; she was proud of her power wheelchair and trying to show it off. Guess who won? Picture her blithely disregarding my instructions, zooming around the halls of the school, a pack of adults running after her, laughing.

As gleeful as she can be, life is difficult for her and her parents. The knowledge that comes from frequent hospitalizations and dependency on complicated, bulky and expensive medical equipment has seeped into their work, alongside deep insights on how disability shapes family life. This understanding took theatrical form in 2017 with Gold’s Broadway production of The Glass Menagerie, featuring Madison Ferris, an actress with muscular dystrophy, and the debut of Herzog’s play Mary Jane, about the mother of young boy with multiple disabilities.

Last March, when The Glass Menagerie was running at the Belasco Theater, Broken & Woken’s Liz Wollman wrote a great review in which she praised Gold for emphasizing the role disability plays in Tennessee Williams’s masterpiece, and for highlighting Laura’s dexterity, awkwardness and strength, and the toll that simply moving from one part of the room to another can take on her and her family. Actors with disabilities have long been fighting for the right to play themselves on stage, instead of watching able-bodied actors be celebrated for how realistically they can pretend to limp. So I was surprised that some critics questioned Gold’s choice of Ferris, even calling it “exploitative.” I shouldn’t have been. “Exploitative” and “inappropriate” are words people use when they are uncomfortable and don’t have the words, inclination, or desire to explain why. My son’s body makes people uncomfortable, too. Discomfort is a natural reaction that goes away with exposure. All the more reason to have more Ferrises on the stage.

Madison Ferris, Sally Field and Joe Mantello in Gold's The Glass Menagerie
credit: Julieta Cervantes

I saw Mary Jane at New York Theater Workshop back in September. Herzog’s play, brilliantly and empathetically directed by Anne Kaufman, with a stellar cast and set design, holds a vivid and powerful place in my mind.   The first of its two acts takes place in Mary Jane’s “junior one bedroom” apartment in Queens; the second is in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) of a Manhattan hospital. Four of the five cast members take double, complementary roles. In the NYTW production,Liza Colon-Zaya played the home nurse in Mary Jane’s apartment and the doctor in the PICU. Susan Pourfar was a marketing professional with a disabled child and the Orthodox Jewish mother of seven, one of whom is disabled. Brenda Wehle played the super of Mary Jane’s apartment building and the chaplain at the hospital; Danaya Esperanza was the nurse’s niece and a hospital music therapist. At the center of the piece is the titular character, played by Carrie Coon.

Mary Jane’s almost-three-year-old son is Alex. We never see him, but we hear his ventilator, and the beeps that signal trouble. We know that he is loved, but we can’t see who he is or even guess at his personality until the last scene. Thus he first appears to be a problem, a burden, a worry. Only later do we learn that he is also a stubborn, funny, animal-loving little boy who has brought his mother joy and reckless abandon. This is not a play about Alex; it’s about the web of women keeping Alex alive, and his influence.

Before giving birth, Mary Jane was married and studying to be a teacher. After, she is single and struggling to keep her job as an administrative assistant, a job she needs for health insurance and that she loses once Alex is admitted to the hospital for a weeks-long stay. The facts are grim, but the play is not maudlin, nor is it a tragedy, though it skirts with the tragic. Mary Jane has lost the comforts of a conventional middle-class life and the pleasures of an ordinary motherhood, but she has not lost her humor, her capacity for love, or her deep appreciation of her world. Her life might seem circumscribed to an outsider--an effect generated by the cramped interiors of the set design--but she is not imprisoned.

In other words, this is not a conventional narrative, where the heroine starts off stumbling in the dark, and eventually wakes up. She is awake, though exhausted and struggling, from the beginning. The dramatic movement is more an intensification of experience. When we last see Mary Jane, her son is in the O.R., his condition precarious. Nothing is resolved. Nothing is “better.” Mary Jane is with the chaplain, discussing the goldfish she bought for Alex, when she gets one of the visual auras that often precede her migraines. She studies it, fascinated, aware of its beauty, even as the pain is closing in.

Carrie Coon & Susan Pourfar in Herzog's Mary Jane
credit: Joe Amarante

I see this as an inquiry play. Questions are scattered throughout--”Where are we?” shouts the niece, needing an address to give the ambulance driver; “What is it, mom?” asks doctor, when Mary Jane can’t decipher a medical question that she had wanted to ask. The last line of the play, spoken by the chaplain, is a question. A central query the play investigates is not why, but how its characters deal with suffering. There is the husband who had a panic attack the night his son was born and subsequently left. There is the plunger-wielding super, who believes the body turns suffering into cancer, and that cancer may be outwitted by yoga, fresh vegetables, adherence to building codes. There is Chaya, the mother of seven who understands suffering to be a reality of life. She and Mary Jane meet when Chaya is visiting her daughter at the PICU and pumping milk for her two youngest at home. They get into the sort of candid conversation that mothers in such situations sometimes do. Much of it is funny, but some is groping and unadorned, as when Chaya tries to explain the relief she can feel at the hospital:

There’s so much worry, it’s going in a thousand directions all the time, all I can do is keep track of the things I’m worried about. But mostly I’m worried about: will we have to go back to the hospital, will we have another month in the hospital? Because that’s the worst thing, right? The worst thing that can happen. But when we decide, okay, the disaster is here, we’re going, it’s…

Suddenly it’s quiet. It’s like…

…everything I have been doing, that was very nice, but it wasn’t real. This is real. And it’s a relief, that’s what it is, it’s a relief to get back to it.


Mary Jane left me shaking, overcome with awe and gratitude. I was very pleased when the community education liaison at NYTW asked me to come back and lead a post-performance talkback (Strange Beauty, my memoir about growing up with my disabled son, had just come out, and it seemed a good fit). When I returned for the discussion, I spoke about how well the production captured my own experience during Felix’s hospitalizations: the bureaucratic, stifling atmosphere; the feeling of forever waiting, shot through with dazzling moments of clarity and humanity. It also shone a light on the bonds formed between the families of special-needs parents and the people—overwhelmingly underpaid, overextended, barely acknowledged women—who help them. It was good to see these women honored on stage, as it was to see such humor, liveliness and kindness in the face of disability and dying.

Many members of the audience noted that they had been struck by Mary Jane in much the way I had. A writer who had been caring for her mother for the past fifteen years shook her head in appreciation. “Not one false note,” she said. But others could not see the humor and warmth, only the sorrow; these spectators found it unbearably difficult to watch. I was sad to learn that this play, which I found so luminous, depressed them. But that’s just it. We don’t see things the same way; we don’t experience pain the same way.

We each have our own wiggles, patterns, and experiences that make us us; that’s how DNA works. And yet we share much more in common. Theater, the best of it, reminds us of this. When disability, in all its knottiness and difficulty, is allowed on the stage, it allows us to more fully grasp who we are. Plays like Herzog’s Mary Jane and productions like Gold’s The Glass Menagerie do just this by giving the public a chance to examine the way that disability is interwoven into our lives, to grapple with it, learn from it, argue about it, and chink away at our fear.

So thank you, Amy Herzog and Sam Gold for contributing to the recent spike in representation. Honoring disability is part of our DNA; we’re thrilled that it’s part of yours, too.

Please, come out in person on May 3 and celebrate their Double Helix with us! 

The Glass Menagerie

The Glass Menagerie put Tennessee Williams on the map, launching him from near-nobody to internationally celebrated playwright. Lavishly praised by critics and embraced by audiences when it premiered on Broadway in 1944, Menagerie has long since become an American classic. It has been revived on Broadway alone seven times--at least once a decade since the 1960s. But only the current revival (at the Belasco Theater through early July) has featured a disabled actor in the role of Laura Wingfield, the young woman who, following a bout of pleurisy as a teenager, has been left with a limp and very low self-esteem.

Julieta Cervantes

That the role is usually cast with non-disabled and often conventionally beautiful actresses (Calista Flockhart and Celia Keenan-Bolger played Laura in two recent Broadway revivals) isn't terribly surprising. Broadway--really, American mass entertainment in general--has a long history of boneheadedness when it comes to any kind of difference, starting with, oh, blackface minstrelsy, wending past every white actor in an Asian or Native American or Latinx role, pausing to wave along the way at myriad straight performers playing gay or trans people, and tipping a hat at all the thespians who've won awards for stuttering, contorting, looking vacant or vaguely crazy, or learning how to sit convincingly in a wheelchair. I suppose if mass entertainment's most indelible portrayals of disability continue to hover somewhere around Forrest Gump territory, then hiring a person with an actual disability to play a character with something as seemingly slight as a bum leg is hardly a cultural priority. But in casting Madison Ferris, a 25-year-old woman with muscular dystrophy, director Sam Gold upends the longstanding interpretation of Laura as a trembling waif so emotionally fragile and physically scarred that her psyche can be pulverized by a single dashed chance at love and a little broken glass.

Williams described Menagerie as a "memory play," and in it, he recalls his life with his doting if overbearing mother, Edwina, and his beloved older sister, Rose, whose struggles with schizophrenia ended with a botched lobotomy and subsequent institutionalization. Williams's alter ego, Tom Wingfield (Joe Mantello), narrates Menagerie, looking back on his youth as an aspiring writer supporting his mother and sister with factory work. Before he follows in his father's footsteps and splits for good, Tom sneaks off nightly to drink, watch movies and--at least as I read it--enjoy the occasional furtive tryst with other closeted gay men. Amanda Wingfield (Sally Field), Edwina's alter ego, is a bitter, aging southern belle who traded status and upward mobility for a marriage to a charming, philandering alcoholic. When the play begins, Mr. Wingfield has been gone 16 years. Amanda, still reeling from the abandonment, struggles to get by in a small, dumpy St. Louis apartment where she simultaneously dotes on and resents the hell out of her two grown children.

Julieta Cervantes

In Williams's rendering, Laura's limp has left her even more awkward and shy than she was before she got sick. So anxious and self-conscious that taking classes or seeking work causes her to become physically ill, she spends her days listening to old records, wandering around town and playing with her collection of tiny glass animals. Her experience hardly plays into Amanda's near-obsessive desire to marry her off to the kind of handsome, successful man she long dreamed of for herself.

It's easy enough, then, to pair the fragile, diffident Laura with the driving, manic Amanda, which is how the show is often staged: mother becomes the emotional mouthpiece for the stunted daughter, who wants for herself what her mother wants for her. But Gold doesn't do that. An expert in family dynamics (he won a Tony for his direction of Fun Home), Gold subverts the play into one that speaks volumes about living with disability. His is not a traditional adaptation; the action here is taking place in Tom Wingfield's head. The production is starkly lit, sparsely set, often weirdly dreamlike, and at one point it rains, soaking the actors.

Some have accused Gold of exploiting disability for cheap effect. But as the mom of a special kid who hangs with parents of special kids, I'm here to tell you: This is a production that gets us.

In the opening scene, Tom bounds up a set of stairs and onto the stage. Amanda and Laura don't have it quite as easy: Mother drags a wheelchair, while helping her daughter negotiate the steps. Ferris is a wonder of strength and flexibility, and her meticulous progress up the stairs involves hands, legs, butt, and some remarkable folding. Gold stretches the moment to let Laura's efforts sink in.

Laura's disability is woven into life in the Wingfield household. I wish I could bottle the way Field's Amanda chats amiably on the phone while absentmindedly helping Laura, who is splayed on the dinner table, work through a series of PT exercises. These moments may challenge some audiences' expectations, but they're hardly exploitative. Laura's getting the treatment she needs, moving how she needs to move. In a world that wasn't designed with her in mind, that takes effort.

We notice how Laura moves because her moves are unique. Gold often has Mantello and Field sit cross-legged or in a kneeling position, as Ferris does when she's not in her wheelchair. The positions, which seem natural for Ferris, don't look terribly comfortable for other two actors, but families in close quarters can't help but pick up on each other's habits.

Because Amanda and Tom love Laura, they see her not as a collection of symptoms, but as a daughter and sister. This is something that's overlooked by many people who don't live with disability--people who stare at disabled kids or pity them, who call their parents "saints" for simply loving and raising them. In this version of Menagerie, Sally Field's Amanda comes off as less deluded than sad, a slightly broken, outspoken woman who loves her children and can't for the life of her understand why everyone else doesn't, too. She's sometimes a little inappropriate, but then, whose mom isn't?

When I saw the show, a few spectators snickered at Amanda's repeated, hotly defensive insistence that Laura was "not crippled." But when you love someone, you don't see them as a diagnosis--which is why I sometimes need to step out of myself and contemplate my son from a clinical distance or seek an outsider's perspective. I love him so much that I sometimes need to remind myself that he's not like other kids. I love him so much that I sometimes forget to see him. Amanda sees her daughter's beauty, the care she puts into her collection of glass animals, her potential. Her wheelchair? That old thing? What's the big deal?

Ferris's Laura is no shrinking violet like so many other Lauras are. She's more of a levelheaded badass than many Williams women--less a flighty, fluttery Blanche than a pensive, stolid Stella. This may frustrate purists who want Laura to have a quietly measured breakdown after the Gentleman Caller (here played beautifully by Finn Whitrock as both dim and bighearted) accidentally breaks her favorite glass animal (a unicorn, natch!). But Ferris makes a warrior of Laura: She controls of what she can and enjoys a fulfilling inner life, ultimately possessing far greater insight into the ways of an unfair world than her mother can. This upends the mother/daughter dynamic typical of The Glass Menagerie revivals, and if that bothers you, skip it. Maybe go see Phantom of the Opera.

Me? I'm hoping to return to catch Ferris' defiant reaction when Mantello's Tom, still haunted by memories of Laura, wishes aloud for her to let him be.

Tickets for The Glass Menagerie are available for deeply discounted prices on TDF.ORG and at TKTS booths for day-of sales. You can also pay full price on the broadway.com website, check broadwaybox.com for special offers, or try your luck with the TodayTix app.

Liz Wollman is associate professor of music at Baruch College, CUNY, and serves on the doctoral faculty of the theater department at the CUNY Graduate Center. She writes a lot of academic books and articles about the musical theater, and also contributes frequently to the Show Showdown blog. She's married to Andy, who edited this piece, and is the fiercely proud if occasionally inappropriate mom to Paulina and Philip. She's also an Extreme Kids & Crew board member, which makes her very happy.