Anne Gridley (Photo: Maria Baranova)
Watch Me Walk
By Julia Polinsky
Soho Rep’s new production, Watch Me Walk, is an intermittently funny, often nuts, pissed-off pity party piece of avant garde theater created by and starring Anne Gridley. Anne has Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia, a rare degenerative neurological disease that really, really messes with a body’s ability to walk. Her mother and grandmother had it, and she has it, and that family story is the story she tells.
Watch Me Walk begins with the stage in complete darkness, which lasts and lasts, as the audience hears a recording of a phone call between her mother and a man named Pavol. They talk, among other things, about Anne, and how she likes to dance. (It helps to know that Pavol is the creator and director of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and Anne worked with him, and he did a play that was developed from hours of telephone conversations.)
While the voices talk, light slowly comes up on a woman seated stage right. This is Anne, who refers to herself as “disabled” and then asks us, literally, to watch her walk; as the lights come all the way up, she takes her stick and walks back and forth across the stage, right to left and back again, telling her story as she goes.
Anne Gridley (Photo: Maria Baranova)
I wondered if the entire 100 minutes of the show were going to consist of her walking and talking: about her gait, about foot drop, clonus, spasticity, crip time, falling. Arm movements. Neurologists and physical therapists and smiling. Inter-abled relationships. Anne lectures about how to help a “gimp,” and about the disease itself. She talks about what she misses. She names the sticks she uses to walk. She describes them as slides flash behind her (video design from Tei Blow) with the sticks’ names, from James Turell to Gabagool (ask your friend from Newark).
She talks about finding out at the age of 29 that she had what her mom had. Her mother’s response, “I’m sorry you were born,” distils into its absolute essence the world’s unbearable cruelty to the disabled. Fully enraging storytelling, with tons of slides, cool audio/video cues (design by Tei Blow) and interesting costuming (costumes by Lux Haac), but is it theater? When does Anne pull the audience into her experience, instead of telling them about it? Anne walks and talks, and the relentless injustices pile up. Is there no point at which this becomes theater, rather than a somewhat diverting enhanced lecture?
Yes! We meet Alex Gibson and Keith Johnson, both characters named Adonis for very obvious reasons. They are as fit and large as she is disabled and small; they sport athletic wear, sequined jackets, cool sunglasses. They are the Opposite of Anne. They support her as she sings the witty ditty, “I’m just an orphan with an orphan disease.” Then, as things get extra weird, they help her become Dumn Dumn, the Degenerating Upper Motor Neuron. Then there’s an indescribable scene with Ping, the plucky duck from the children’s book, “The Story About Ping.”
Anne Gridley (Photo: Maria Baranova)
Somehow, we come back to slide after slide of family history, and Anne raging and raging and raging against the world. Anne’s heart condition. Anne’s drinking. Anne’s self–harm. Anne, the Biggest Ableist of Them All (cue another song, lots of razzle-dazzle, and both Adonises).
Keith Johnson, Anne Gridley, Alex Gibson (Photo: Maria Baranova)
Then she leaves the stage. The audience, of course, applauds, thinking the show is over. No; now, we get “The Ha Ha Ha History of Disability” song, led by an Adonis, which requires audience participation. Anne returns, talks about her mother’s death, and frames the end of the show as it began: with a phone conversation between her mother and Pavol, talking about Anne and dance, as Anne re-creates her childhood memory of dancing in the rain (choreography from Asli Bulbul).
Watch Me Walk is more like a podcast than a theater piece, regardless of visual cues, costuming, lighting, whatever. It’s a scathing condemnation of what passes for healthcare in this country, and a whole lot of rage.
At the Peter J. Sharp Theater at Playwrights Horizons
416 W. 42nd St
Running time: 100 minutes, no intermission
Through February 8
