By Mark Steidl for Unabridged Press
PITTSBURGH — Would you tell a room full of strangers about your illness or disability?
Pittsburgh comedian Brian Gray has started speaking openly on stage about his struggle with crippling migraines. But it took a while to share his story–with his partners on stage, coworkers, and even to wrap his head around it himself.
“I can never be a traditional actor or a comedian living the life on the road and all that that comes with it because of–of this way that I am,” Gray says. “ A lot of times that just gets me depressed.”
He says that when teaching or acting, he has to make backup plans. The nature of improv comedy as a team production is helpful.
“I don’t make a whole cast responsible for understudying me…for shows that I have to miss,” he says.
Our “Look Who’s Here!” podcast host Mark Steidl and Point Park University student Nicole Paxinos spoke with Gray, who’s taught improv in Austin and New Orleans. He is the Education Director of the Pittsburgh Comedy Festival. He also serves as a teacher and New Artist Ambassador with Arcade Comedy Theater, where he performs.
Gray says he admires other performers with disabilities, such as local comedian Gab Bonesso, who talks about her struggles with mental health, and national performer Josh Blue, who has cerebral palsy.
These performers and performances can connect us as human beings, Gray says, and allow us all to laugh with them.
But Gray says it’s important for improvisers to be aware of the physical and emotional limitations of their partners.
“Having conversations about what makes us ourselves, as opposed to sort of hiding those things as we sometimes are taught or socialized to do, really makes this work special,” he says in the interview with Steidl and Paxinos.
Gray says getting to a point as a performer where he can integrate his physical limitation has been a journey, but it’s better than “shaking my fist in the air, which is what I did for many years.”
In this podcast episode, Gray also compares notes with Steidl and Paxinos about how network TV shows portray disability. ABC’s “The Good Doctor” and Netflix’s “Atypical” incorporate characters who have autism spectrum disorder. “Speechless” was recently cancelled, but featured a character with cerebral palsy who used a communication device (similar to that used by Stephen Hawking, the machine typically reads aloud the user’s typed words). In Speechless, the teen with cerebral palsy hired a person to read from the device, which is rarely the case in reality. Gray and Steidl agreed that authenticity should be the next phase of inclusion–hiring actors who have the disabilities portrayed, and showing the disabilities more accurately.
This piece, and companion video were produced in collaboration with the Center for Media Innovation at Point Park University as part of our Abilities Media Project. The work is funded by The FISA Foundation and an anonymous foundation.
