From the SDC Journal Spring 2019 issue

Director Jo Bonney and actor Gregg Mozgala worked together on the Manhattan Theatre Club production of Martyna Majok’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Cost of Living, a play about parallel relationships between characters with disabilities and potential romantic partners. Bonney and Mozgala met after the production to discuss breaking down barriers to the casting of actors with disabilities, in both disabled and non-disabled roles. This is an excerpt of that conversation.

GREGG MOZGALA | I’m always aware of it, I’m always conscious of it, but I don’t spend my days talking about my disability.

JO BONNEY | Nor does your family, your friends, or your work colleagues. That seems to be huge in terms of how we integrate this storytelling into…

GREGG | The cultural fabric of our lives.

JO | Exactly. Maybe that’s how, in terms of choreographers and directors, we can approach this. How we can get over, somehow, the hump, the sort of abstract obstacle of introducing disability into a cast?

GREGG | I don’t necessarily know if abstract is the right term because I feel like in some way, shape, or form, I’m having to explain my existence in myriad ways, big and small, to people who see me or are curious. You transfer that into this professional world, which is very surface, based on image. This doesn’t necessarily fit an ideal, right?

The same issues apply, I think. But where I am now is why I’m looking for specifically—for lack of a better term—disability narratives. It’s because I feel until we’re seen and feel like we can own our own disabilities as part of our humanity, then we won’t be seen as people. We have to be seen as disabled people before we can be seen as people in a larger context.

JO | Do you think that stops us from being able to tell these stories now if we’re not being specific to that concern?

GREGG | I think the directors have the power to say, “I want this person.” If they see the actor and say, “I want this person in my show” or “That’s important to me.” From my own experience, in audition scenarios, that hasn’t translated to work in existing works in the canon where the character is not written as disabled.

JO | And why didn’t that happen?

GREGG | Because I think, “I would never be cast as Biff from Death of a Salesman,” right? Regardless of whether I’m the right type or not, let’s say I was. It’s just a question. Biff was a former athlete and football star.

JO | But couldn’t you be cast as Bernard, the neighbor who becomes a successful lawyer in Washington? If it were a non-athletic character who is viewed as smart but not appreciated in this physical environment.

GREGG | You could do that, as long as it does something to illuminate the story. I think you just have to watch out for it being a gimmick.

JO | It’s almost like that’s something you have to crash through, the idea that it’s a gimmick. Because it
is a gimmick as long as it’s so rare that it pulls attention to itself. But if it becomes more common, then it’s simply representing the broader society. As you said, then we’re sitting here just watching people.

GREGG | Yeah, even with Cost of Living, which was specifically written with disabled characters, look at the media response. It was so foreign or new to people that a lot of the news coverage was that this unheard-of, unseen, rare white buffalo of a thing was happening, and that’s because it just doesn’t happen. So people weren’t talking necessarily about the play or the issues raised in the play or the incredible intersectionality of that play, the economics, whatever. They were focused on “There’s a woman with no leg and…”

JO | Bodies on stage.

GREGG | Right. That’s a huge part of the story too, but that play was about the people in relationship with other people and negotiating bodies of all different kinds, but that was somehow lost in translation. I think because it is such a new idea, people don’t know how to talk about it.

JO | People tippy-toe around this subject. But if we could move past that… Because I remember, at one point, you said, “We will have really made it when we get a bad review in terms of an actor in a body you’re not used to seeing on stage, that we’re not even going to consider that as a part of our conversation. We’re going to assess…”

GREGG | Just the work.

JO | Exactly. But that’s where we need to encourage people to feel that this is not an extraordinary choice to make. This is not physically insurmountable.

GREGG | Insurmountable is a good word because the perception is that it is insurmountable. It does take more time to have the conversation; it does take more work, depending on where you’re at. On a commercial level, it’s more time, and time is money, and you’ve got all these pressures. So I think that’s why it’s
easier to just not tell those stories or, when those characters come up, to cast non-disabled actors in those roles because, “Well, they’re a good actor and we can put them in, and we don’t have to worry about…”

JO | Their needs.

GREGG | Or getting that person up to speed, because access to training—and good training—is also an issue.

JO | You had such a history with the development of Cost of Living, but the search for the character of Ani was extensive and often frustrating (we solicited tapes from across America and I did auditions on the East and West Coasts). Finding Katy [Sullivan]—who took the opportunity to flex her muscles and grow to the next level as an actor—was incredibly rewarding. She was even more than we had hoped for.

GREGG | Listen to Sam Gold talk about working with Madison [Ferris, in The Glass Menagerie] and all the battles that he alluded to—of talking to the producers, of saying, “No, this is my choice. This is going to work.” We have to have choreographers say yes to one person who is in a different body or has different access to their body than a trained, professional, non-disabled dancer.

JO | Isn’t that where it becomes interesting?

GREGG | Yes, but you have to be interested in all that that means, and be willing to take all of that on.

JO | I think that’s the big issue. If a director or choreographer ha

s a vision like that for a production, then we find ourselves in the position of asking “What are we willing to take on?” If we can bring all our collaborators on board then there should be nothing that stops us.

 

 

JO BONNEY has directed premieres of plays by Suzan-Lori Parks, Lynn Nottage, Danny Hoch, Diana Son, Anna Deveare Smith, Naomi Wallace, Eric Bogosian, Alan Ball, Hammad Chaudry, Culture Clash, Eve Ensler, Jessica Goldberg, Neil LaBute, Warren Leight, Ione Lloyd, Martyna Majok, Dael Orlandersmith, Darci Picoult, Will Power, John Pollono, David Rabe, José Rivera, Universes, Michael Weller, and Lisa Loomer. She is the recipient of an Obie Award for Sustained Excellence of Direction; Lucille Lortel Awards for Best Musical and Best Revival; a Drama Desk nomination and Lilly Award for Direction of By the Way, Meet Vera Stark; and an AUDELCO Award for Father Comes Home from the Wars. She is the editor of Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century (TCG).

GREGG MOZGALA is a New York City-based actor who has appeared on stage at The Public Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, Manhattan Theatre Club, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and many others. For his work in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Cost of Living by Martyna Majok, he received a Drama Desk nomination, an Outer Critics Circle nomination, and won a Lucille Lortel Award for Best Featured Actor. Gregg is the Founder and Artistic Director of The Apothetae, a company dedicated to the production of works that explore and illuminate the “Disabled Experience.”