For new Phamaly Theatre Company Artistic Director Ben Raanan, live theater is an act of political violence. Then again, as a man with disabilities, he thinks pretty much everything he does is an act of political violence. Because ordinary people tend to be as terrified of disability as they are of that sociopathic cat in “Alice in Wonderland.”
A person in a wheelchair navigating a door makes people uncomfortable. A person with a disability talking about sex makes people uncomfortable. A theater company showing what a person with a disability goes through without simply trying to engender sympathy from the audience? All inherently political acts, he says.
“We as a society only want to see disability if it’s palatable to us,” said Raanan, who assumed the artistic leadership of Denver’s highly regarded disability-affirmative theater company in June. “People don’t know what to do when the primary goal isn’t simply to get you to look at a disabled person and say, ‘Oh, my God, that person is so sweet and so kind.’ I want to show people the ugly side of disability, too.”
Raanan, 32, is not one to walk on eggshells. He crushes them.
That’s why you can expect any production that Phamaly takes on under Raanan to be political in nature — even if the subject is not at all political in the traditional sense. Which is right in line with the company’s original rebel spirit. When Raanan says, “Any Phamaly show must have a moment of clarity for non-disabled individuals as to what it means to be disabled,” he’s echoing the mantra Phamaly has been saying since five fed-up disabled actors started the company 32 years ago as a proactive effort to create their own performance opportunities.
So, you might see Phamaly stage the family classic “Alice in Wonderland” — and you can, right now, through Sept. 5 at the Su Teatro Performing Arts Center. But the Phamaly version, performed by disabled actors, invariably impacts audiences in a way no other theater company can. First off, this is a hip-hop adaptation with an original score by rapper Kalyn Heffernan, MC of the Denver band Wheelchair Sports Camp. (She also plays the head of the Cheshire Cat.) And the concept is pure Phamaly.
“The traditional story goes like this: A girl is bored, she goes down this rabbit hole and she realizes, ‘Oh, life is all around me,’ ” Raanan said. “Our version starts with someone with a disability in the hospital. She is at her lowest of lows. She’s just suffered a panic attack and is scared of being berated. And so she goes into this very dark world where you see all these traditional, fun characters, and everything is tinged with this element of self-discovery. But here’s the thing about self-discovery: It isn’t always pretty. It can be awesome, and it can be exciting … but self-discovery can be scary, too.”
For anyone who saw Phamaly set the fanciful Bible story “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” in a mental hospital, or present a Nazi-era “Cabaret” where literally every actor on the stage would have been exterminated themselves for being somehow defective, will see this “Alice,” directed by departing Artistic Director Regan Linton, as quintessential Phamaly, too.
Perhaps not coincidentally, one of the milestone productions in Raanan’s odyssey was a college production of “Cabaret” at Drake University in Iowa. For Raanan, the revelation was being cast as Herr Schulz, the lovestruck old German Jew, and being told that professional theater was never going to happen for him unless he learned to hide his left arm. “That was the message I was getting from relatives, teachers and fellow artists,” he said.
Raanan was born with Erb’s palsy, a condition that paralyzed his arm for a few years and eventually left him with 50 percent mobility and chronic pain. “But a lot of people with Erb’s Palsy have an arm that is foreshortened, and so a lot of people were like, ‘Thank God you don’t have that. You can hide that,’ ” Raanan said. “As if that were some stroke of luck.”
Raanan was 26 when he fully embraced his identity as a disabled man.
“I do believe that’s when I was actually born,” he said. That’s when my life started, because I was living a false identity until then.”
Raanan may have been born at 26, but he was birthed in Chicago with both Erb’s Palsy and a mild cognitive disability. But the family focus was necessarily on his brother, Adam, who has what Ben calls “Capital A” autism. “If you were to look in the dictionary at high-impact autism, that would be my brother,” he said. “So I came from this world of being disabled, but also of not being disabled enough to get that recognition. Coming to terms with that was a big part of my journey.”
It was an innocuous question from a college professor that set Raanan on the path that has now led him to Denver: “So what do you want to give to the world?” The answer, he eventually discovered, was himself. “What I have to give to the world is who I am as a human being and my beliefs and what I believe about disability,” Raanan said. “I spent so much time trying not to be who I am. But now I believe the reason I have gotten anything in this world is because I am wholeheartedly and unapologetically a disabled man myself.”
The timing on the Phamaly job — which is unique in that it is structured as a “co-leadership” gig alongside Managing Director Sasha Hutchings — could have been better. His partner had just landed her dream job, and the couple bought a house in Cincinnati just two months before the Phamaly offer came in. But a friend quickly disabused Raanan of any notion of passing.
“She told me: ‘If you don’t take this job for any reason, then I don’t think we can be friends anymore, because everything you have told me will have been a lie. Phamaly has all the things you have been preaching for your entire life about what it means to be an artist.’ ”
If this isn’t his dream job, Raanan said, “Then I don’t know what is.” So, long-distance love it is.
Raanan recently issued something of a vision manifesto for his leadership tenure, one that takes square aim at anything that dehumanizes the disabled community.
“For the longest time it’s been, ‘You are an abomination because you are disabled.’ Or, ‘You are something that needs to be fixed because you are disabled.’ Or, ‘You are a charity case because you are disabled,’ ” he said.
“Because of that, we as a society tend to curate the emotions of people who are disabled and say, ‘Well, this is what you can feel: You can feel grateful. You can feel sad. But you can’t feel angry. And you can’t feel creative.’ To me, the act of doing very artistically rigorous art that actually matters and means something is standing up against all of that.”
In Phamaly’s artistic space, he promised, “No one is allowed to curate your emotional response to a performance. Your accessibility needs, no matter what they may be, are both valid and vital. All disabilities, whether they be visible or invisible, are welcome here. There is no such thing as being ‘more disabled’ or ‘less disabled.’ No matter who you are, this community belongs to you. You are welcome. You belong.”
Denver Gazette contributing arts columnist John Moore is an award-winning journalist who was named one of the 10 most influential theater critics by American Theatre Magazine. He is now producing independent journalism as part of his own company, Moore Media.