According to actor and dramaturg Anne Gridley’s neurologist, humans can only consciously attend to walking for about eight seconds before the act slips into muscle memory. Yet Watch Me Walk, written by Gridley, challenges us to spend nearly two hours thinking about walking. 

The autobiographical play begins with the veteran experimental performer pacing the stage in rose-adorned combat boots—more useful, she later notes, than $7,000 custom orthotics—and near silence. The sense that something might happen eventually ebbs into boredom. Why turn foot drop, the dragging of the front foot, into a spectacle? 

Before long, Gridley deliberately falls and then asks the audience to offer help—and to accept her refusal. Later, she presents a slideshow on her 20 colorful walking sticks; some of their names are Dorothy Parker, Tonya Harding, and Gabagool. At one point, wearing a ballgown made of caution tape reading “fall risk,” she ascends a ladder. She sings, “I’m climbing on a ladder, and it’s making you feel nervous—and yes, that is the point.”  

Directed by Eric Ting, Watch Me Walk educates non-disabled viewers and invites them to confront their discomfort. “Maybe don’t say ‘spaz’ anymore; that word describes the way I walk,” Gridley told Culturebot. “So every time you just casually say, ‘I was spazzing out,’ I want you to think of me walking back and forth stiffly across the stage.” 

Gridley is having fun, too, even as she, at other times, fights back tears. Full of tonal turns, the production is at once cringey, candid, wacky, and whimsical. Through a series of loosely connected but ultimately moving vignettes, Gridley chronicles her life with hereditary spastic paraplegia (HSP), probing tragic family narratives, ableist encounters (“It was a woman, so I didn’t punch her in the face”), and health insurance struggles (“Viva Luigi!”). 

She dramatizes her neurodegenerative condition—shared by her mother and grandmother—by dressing as a gigantic purple nerve cell and as Little Orphan Annie, wryly highlighting the chronic disregard for so-called “orphan diseases,” whose rarity limits research and pharmaceutical attention. 

Observed annually on the last day of February, Rare Disease Day is an international effort to expand access to healthcare, diagnosis, and therapies for people with rare diseases. Although Watch Me Walk closed its in-person run on February 15, a recording of the play will stream for one week starting on February 28. The same day at 3:00 p.m. EST, the Spastic Paraplegia Foundation (SPF) will host a Rare Disease Day online forum on HSP and Primary Lateral Sclerosis, featuring patients, families, researchers, and advocates. 

Soho Rep, where Watch Me Walk was staged, hopes that streaming the play alongside SPF’s virtual event “will create a coordinated awareness moment,” showing how “storytelling, dialogue, and science together help humanize rare neurological diseases while advancing the pursuit of effective treatments and a cure.” 

Photos by Maria Baranova

WNYC: Under The Radar’s “Watch Me Walk”

4:48 Psychosis raises the question of what constitutes theater. Is this a case study in psychotic depression, a work of art, or both? Can one call language without boundaries a play? What direction remains for contemporary theater to take following total fragmentation?  
 

These concerns have not stood in the way of 4:48 Psychosis being produced - if anything, it seems to be gaining in popularity. What could be stumbling blocks are seen by directors as a challenge to be met creatively. The play’s initial production, at London’s Royal Court (2000) divided the words among three performers. All three initially learned the whole text, and although most lines were eventually allocated, others were voiced spontaneously by different actors from performance to performance. The “action” appeared to take place within the mind of the protagonist. Projections onto a mirror helped create a Rorschach-like effect. As evidence that the play encourages a wide variety of interpretations, in the celebrated TR Warszawa production, six actors embodied discrete characters, creating encounters between a central character and her doctor, family members, or friends. This production, brought to New York in 2014, employed a Polish translation with English surtitles.  Another production, by Theatre du Pif of Hong Kong in 2016, purported to bring “an Asian sensibility” to the play, using a Korean designer and Hong Kong musicians.”  

In conclusion, 4:48 Psychosis is clearly not everyone’s idea of entertainment (one critic likened watching it to being locked in a freezer). However, it provides a beautiful, albeit brutal, window into the depressed, suicidal mind.  

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database.  

Primary Source Sarah Kane: Complete Plays 
Publisher Bloomsbury Methuen Drama 
Place Published New York 
Page Count 43 
Web Art: File:4.48 psychose.JPG – Wikimedia Commons 

Carrie Coon, Letts’ wife, plays Agnes White, a lonely server living in an Oklahoma motel who falls in love with Peter Evans (Namir Smallwood), an AWOL Gulf veteran. Peter becomes increasingly convinced that he is the subject of clandestine experiments, and that he is infested with government-planted bugs. These bugs are, of course, invisible, yet he drags Agnes with him into a seeming folie à deux—a bedlam of flypaper, aluminum foil, and bug zappers.  

Peter’s delusions (and, in turn, Agnes’s) eventually cross a line into a realm in which logic no longer applies. By spilling so far into excess, even occasionally veering into bizarre spoofiness, Bug risks trivializing Peter’s paranoia—a risk especially fraught now that the part is played for the first time by a Black actor.  

Initially, Peter cites a real case of government experimentation: the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which poor Black sharecroppers were never told they had syphilis. The experiment ran from 1932 until 1972—long after penicillin became the standard treatment in the mid-1940s. To observe how the disease naturally progressed, researchers deliberately withheld the antibiotic, ending the study only after a press leak. 

This gross violation of ethics is widely believed to have damaged Black Americans’ trust in the medical establishment. But according to medical ethicist Harriet A. Washington [1], “that narrative is flawed and untrue.” While Tuskegee certainly contributes to that distrust, the larger impetus is “four centuries of abuse in the medical arena,” which Washington chronicles in her 2007 book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. “In fact, one study indicated that African Americans who had never heard of Tuskegee were more likely to fear vaccine administration and medication design.” 

What if Bug had dialed down Peter’s paranoia and explored it within this broader historical context instead of reinforcing the singularity of Tuskegee? Overemphasizing Tuskegee because of its infamy (or because of one’s ignorance) serves to obscure other historical ethics violations as well as systemic racial inequities that persist today. For instance, what if Peter struggled to access mental healthcare because of structural barriers? 

In her 2021 book Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Medical Consent, Washington mentions an experimental anthrax vaccine that soldiers were required to receive beginning in 1998. “Soldiers of all races were affected,” she writes, “but Blacks were overrepresented because they constituted 12.3 percent of Americans, but were 24.5 percent of the 1.7 million ground troops deployed to the Gulf in 1990 and 26.2 percent of Army reservists in 2001—twice their representation in the population at large, and so at twice the risk of being forced into military research.” 

Many service members reported autoimmune conditions after getting the jab, but the Pentagon attributed their symptoms to “emotional issues,” Washington continues. “The military subsumed vaccine-related illnesses under the nebulous symptomatology of ‘Gulf War Syndrome.’” What if Bug had dramatized that ‘nebulous symptomatology’? 

Peter also references another example of government research: the Edgewood Arsenal experiments. After World War II, the U.S. Army Chemical Corps tested chemical weapons on American soldiers at a secluded research facility on the Chesapeake Bay, exposing volunteers to more than 250 different chemicals, including LSD, mustard gas, and sarin. The studies ended after researchers were accused of ethical transgressions, including issues with informed consent and recruitment. Archival footage, unearthed in a 2022 documentary, shows men “going temporarily blind, reduced to babbling or completely dysfunctional logs, or worse, ready to commit violence upon themselves.” [2] 

Washington argues in Carte Blanche that “the medical crimes that were denounced and punished at Nuremberg have American analogues.” 

“Although not perfect parallels,” she notes, “they share a violent, nonconsensual, and largely racial disparate nature, as well as the frequent invocation of military expedience.” 

In this light, Peter’s condemnation of his doctors as neo-Nazis feels less outlandish than the play permits. Letts may hint that Peter is not entirely psychotic—that his madness holds some truth. But that seed never grows.  

The play ultimately bubbles over (spoiler alert: self-harm, violence, and fire). A future iteration of the three-decades-old play, if there is one, might benefit from taking Peter’s delusions more seriously—and leaving open the possibility that they are, in fact, real. 

Bug will get under your skin, but to what end? 

Bug, through March 8th at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in New York; manhattantheatreclub.com/shows/2025-26-season/bug/.  

[1] “Harriet A. Washington on the Narrative Around Vaccine Hesitancy in the African American Community: In Conversation with Andrew Keen.” Keen On from Literary Hub, 19 Mar. 2021, lithub.com/harriet-a-washington-on-the-narrative-around-vaccine-hesitancy-in-the-african-american-community/. 
[2] Simonpillai, Radheyan. “‘It Affected a Great Number of People’: Inside the World of Shocking Military Drug Experiments.” The Guardian, 9 June 2022, theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/jun/09/dr-delirium-and-the-edgewood-experiments-documentary. 

Web image by Matthew Murphy.

Directed by Anne Kauffman, the play features “Primes,” or holographic simulations of the dead intended for therapeutic use by the living. June Squibb—who, at 96, is making history as the oldest performer to open a Broadway show—astonishes as Marjorie, an impish 85-year-old with dementia using a much younger version of her husband Walter (an uncanny yet tender Christopher Lowell) to regain and retain her memory. Marjorie’s daughter Tess (the incredible Cynthia Nixon) is skeptical and fearful of the technology, whereas Tess’s husband Jon, played by a standout Danny Burstein, is a fan—until an on-the-nose change of heart in the penultimate scene. 

Marjorie Prime’s central flaw is that it favors concepts over dramatic depth. The characters are well-acted but underdeveloped, and almost all they do is talk; the biggest event may be Marjorie urinating herself. Yet, despite its slow pace and formulaic structure, Marjorie Prime is intelligent and poignant. 

Marjorie’s memories are embellished and sanitized for her comfort and convenience. The fallibility of memory is hardly a novel concept, but the Primes enable this reconstructive process and also become a stand-in for genuine connection in the wake of grief, preventing the family from confronting painful realities and repairing their relationships.  

By the time the truth fully surfaces in the unsettling final scene, which makes adroit use of a stage turntable (props to scenic designer Lee Jellinek), there are no humans left to heal. When storytelling is delegated to AI, truth becomes archival rather than relational; however, truth must be witnessed between living people in order to be ethically and therapeutically meaningful.  

Playwright Jordan Harrison’s Primes, like flesh-and-blood clinicians, absorb and co-construct patients’ accounts of self, yet they are disembodied, unfeeling, and ultimately unable to act with compassion, turning dynamic stories into datasets.   

Marjorie Prime, through Feb. 15 at the Helen Hayes Theater in New York; 2st.com/shows/marjorie-prime.  

“Much of healthcare happens in interpersonal moments,” write Maura Spiegel and Danielle Spencer in the first chapter of The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine—and machines are good at many things, but participating in a truly interpersonal moment is likely not one of them. Several studies have suggested that models perform worse for underrepresented groups because they are trained on datasets that lack racial, cultural, and linguistic diversity. Additionally, AI may miss subtle emotional cues and fail to interpret tone, context, and metaphors, which, one bioethicist [1] predicts, could “fundamentally alter” how trust is practiced in healthcare. Others [2] have underscored that “AI should be viewed not as a replacement for the physician, but as a partner in delivering empathetic, patient-centered care.” 

However, AI is not wholly bad. For example, a recent systematic review [3] found that applying natural language processing (NLP) to unstructured text in electronic health records (EHRs) can detect signs of cognitive impairment. Some [4] have found solace in text-based simulations with lost loved ones. And perhaps technology should be viewed as a vehicle for strengthening partnerships between clinicians and patients. Designed by Gabriela Gomes, the video game Healing Spaces aims to help those with neurodegenerative diseases connect with their caregivers. It is a multisensory experience: an app with beach and forest scenes, and a box with aromatherapy that smells like pine trees. Healing Spaces may evoke memories or even create new ones between caregiver and patient, unlike the Primes’ hollow curation. 

Healing Spaces also includes sunscreen-scented lotion that caregivers can use to massage the hands of those in their care. Needless to say, holograms and lotion don’t pair well. “You can’t touch a hologram. So there’s something about them looking so much like your loved ones, but not being able to quite achieve intimacy with them,” said Harrison during Marjorie Prime’s Off-Broadway run about a decade ago. “The loneliness can never be quite extinguished, never satisfied, because they’re just pixels.”  

[1] Kerasidou, Angeliki. “Artificial Intelligence and the Ongoing Need for Empathy,  Compassion and Trust in Healthcare.” Bulletin of the World Health Organization, vol. 98, no. 4, 2020, pp. 245-250. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7133472/. 

[2] Ghenimi, Nadirah, et al. “Integrating AI with Narrative-Based Medicine: Enhancing Patient-Centered Care in Primary Practice.” Perspectives in Primary Care, 5 Dec. 2024, info.primarycare.hms.harvard.edu/perspectives/articles/integrating-ai-with-narrative-based-medicine.  

[3] Shankar, Ravi et al. “Natural Language Processing of Electronic Health Records for Early Detection of Cognitive Decline: A Systematic Review.”npj Digital Medicine, vol. 8, no. 1, 2025, p. 133. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40025194/. 

[4] Fagone, Jason. “The Jessica Simulation: Love and Loss in the Age of A.I.” The San Francisco Chronicle, 23 July 2021, sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/jessica-simulation-artificial-intelligence/. 

Web image from 2nd Street Theater.

In Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, a plague ravages Thebes as divine punishment for an unpunished crime—the murder of the eponymous king’s predecessor.

Two and a half millennia later, illness remains a metaphor in Robert Icke’s buzzy retelling of the Freud-genic tragedy, now on Broadway after a West End run last fall. Susan Sontag, who cautioned that portraying disease as a symbol of social decay can stigmatize patients, would likely disapprove. (Perhaps, apotheosized on Mount Olympus, she cursed Lesley Manville, who plays Oedipus’s wife and—spoiler alert—mother Jocasta, with an illness; Denise Cormier filled in when I saw the production.)

At curtain rise, on a stage-wide video screen, Oedipus (a charismatic and commanding Mark Strong)—reimagined as a politician on the cusp of electoral victory—tells a throng of eager reporters and supporters: “The civic body is ill. And that isn’t… chemicals in lakes—it’s us; we’re sick… The water got poisoned, and we got used to the taste.”

Economic inequality and xenophobia abound, as do rumors surrounding the death of Laius, the former ruler and Jocasta’s former husband. And so Oedipus promises to open an investigation. This off-script announcement exasperates his campaign manager and brother-in-law Creon (John Carroll Lynch), but Oedipus is steadfast in determining what happened. In Icke’s adaptation, probing the metaphorical plague is less a divine mandate and more a political act of narrative control. And, as Oedipus doubles down on transparency, what he uncovers about a fateful crossroads unravels his sense of self.

The truth of Oedipus’s identity is old news for most viewers, and we know that he is going to win. Yet Hildegard Bechtler’s set—an office with a hodgepodge of furniture, TV screens, and a clock counting down until the release of the election results—cultivates a palpable sense of uncertainty.

The successful set embodies Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, or the inextricable fusion of time and space in literature. The literary theorist cites the road as one example of a chronotope. Social divisions such as class, nationality, and religion collapse, and time unfolds unpredictably through chance encounters rather than routine.

In Oedipus, as election night comes to a close, movers strip the campaign headquarters bare, transforming the space into a chronotope that mirrors how our hero is stripped of everything he once believed about himself. The ticking clock heightens the temporal pressure, heralding the landslide victory while portending the inexorable revelation that Oedipus did what every little boy dreams: killed Dad and married Mom.

Bakhtin also argues that chronotopes allow abstract ideas about philosophy, society, and cause and effect—say, the limits of free will and the illusion of power—to “take on flesh and blood.” Oedipus highlights the vital role chronotopes play in narratives, even if the coda transports us to the start of the campaign, undoing everything.

And even if much of the script doesn’t sparkle. For instance, Jocasta telling Oedipus “You’ll be the death of me” and calling him “baby boy” feels heavy-handed. Modern updates to Oedipus’s family dynamic have mixed success. The parts of adoptive mother Merope (Anne Reid) and daughter Antigone (Olivia Reis) are a welcome addition and expansion, respectively, bringing understated humor and wisdom. On the other hand, Icke casts one of Oedipus’s sons, Polyneices (James Wilbraham), as gay and the other, Eteocles (Jordan Scowen), as unfaithful. This framing raises an uneasy question: Are we meant to read queerness as a moral transgression on par with infidelity or incest? (Sontag, who was bisexual, probably wouldn’t be thrilled by this either.)

Icke’s greatest writing, however, is Jocasta’s hesitatingly revealed, harrowing backstory: She was only 13 when Laius raped her and forced her to abandon the resulting child. Jocasta recalls the delivery in visceral detail: the fluorescent lights of the hospital, the newborn Oedipus’s mucus-slick body. But she is denied the opportunity to share her traumatic account on her own terms; in his relentless quest for answers, Oedipus forces her long-hidden narrative, precipitating the discovery of their true relationship.

Narrative medicine emphasizes that this kind of listening can be destructive to both patient and listener. Indeed, Jocasta kills herself, and Oedipus gouges out his eyes with her heels. (Not very healing.)

Some narrative humility would have served Oedipus well. As Sayantani DasGupta writes, “narrative humility acknowledges that our patients’ stories are not objects that we can comprehend or master, but rather dynamic entities that we can approach and engage with, while simultaneously… engaging in constant self-evaluation and self-critique about issues such as our own role in the story.” With greater narrative humility, Oedipus might have better seen Jocasta—and himself.

Icke’s Oedipus teaches us that listening must be humble, ethical, and emotionally attuned; had it been so, perhaps the drama’s seemingly inevitable ending could have been averted.

Oedipus, through Feb. 8 at Studio 54 in New York; oedipustheplay.com.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, 1981, pp. 84-258.

DasGupta, Sayantani. “Narrative Humility.” The Lancet, vol. 371, no. 9617, 2008, pp. 980-981. thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2808%2960440-7/fulltext

Web image from Sonia Friedman Productions Limited.

Actor Clark Middleton wrote this autobiographical dramatic monologue in collaboration with Robert Knopf. Stricken with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis at age four, Middleton enacts his early painful experience — painful physically and emotionally. He takes us through an adolescence complicated by physical difference, his interaction with medical professionals over the years, and his craving to become an actor. Middleton struggles with the medical establishment, the pain and humor of coming-of-age, and ultimate self acceptance. Eventually, he was able to have both hip replacement surgery and a career in theater and film. The play is funny, poignant, and instructive.

Miracle Mile was performed in New York City in Fall, 1997 at Theater Row. The New York Times review called the play, “an enriching chronicle of a man who refuses to let the world take him at face value.” Middleton performed his monologue at New York University School of Medicine and at other institutions. Clips of a videotape of the theater performance are available at this web site.

Archive Videos from the Play

Actor Information
Clark Middleton (actor/author) performed MIRACLE MILE Off-Broadway in the fall of 1997. He has appeared in Sam Shephard’s CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS as well as Mr. Shephard’s CHICAGO at the Signature Theatre Company. Clark was in William Hoffman’s AFTER THE ORCHARD and performed MIRACLE MILE at the Invaluable Cape Cod Theater Project. He began his professional career performing with the late Geraldine Page in productions of THE MADWOMAN OF CHAILLOT, PARADISE LOST, and VIVAT VIVAT REGINA. Since that time he has appeared in more than 40 NYC productions, most notably at the New York Shakespeare Festival, The Public Theatre, LaMaMa and Circle Rep, where he appeared with Olympia Dukakis in THE HOPE ZONE. In NYC Clark has directed LONE STAR, OUR DALY BREAD, DOMINO COURTS, CALL IT CLOVER and KIDNAPPED. He also directed MARVIN’S ROOM at The Wayside Theatre in Virginia. Clark can be seen in the films BAIL JUMPER, STORIES FROM NEW YORK, THE CONTENDERS and DON’T SHOOT DARLING. Clark plays the forensics expert Ellis on NBC-TV’s LAW & ORDER. He is a native of Tucson, Arizona and a member of both the Lab Theater Company and the 42nd Street Workshop.

Clark died on October 4, 2020. He was 63 years old.

Director Michael Warren Powell
Leading Actors Clark Middleton
Video Courtesy of Michelle Bouchard
Original Date of Entry 07/12/06

An earlier version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed).

Web Photo by Alex Radelich 

It is one thing to read about bipolar disorder in a textbook, and another thing to observe it firsthand. Some of us have friends or family members whom we have seen in the throes of a manic episode. As a psychiatrist, I have witnessed mania at close range literally hundreds of times. But to be an audience member and to experience it in a way that manages to be both educational and entertaining is a rare privilege. And to do so as a multimedia event, fusing theater with visual arts, is surely unique.  

Sam Kissajukian’s one-man show 300 Paintings is a must-see that is currently enjoying a return engagement at the Vineyard Theatre in New York. (It is purely a coincidence that the theater, just off Union Square, is a block away from my former psychiatric office of eighteen years.)  

Kissajukian is an Australian stand-up comic. In 2021, during the pandemic, he experienced a five-month bipolar manic episode. During that time, despite having no previous background in visual arts, he decided to become a painter. Moving into a warehouse, he began to paint. He barely slept, frequently turning out multiple works a day. By the end of the episode he had created three hundred paintings, documenting his mental state.  

Kinssajukian has created the show he calls 300 Paintings as the culmination of his personal and artistic journey. The show has won numerous awards, including Best Comedy at Sydney Fringe 2022 and 2023, and the Mental Health Awareness Award at Adelaide Fringe 2024. It has played at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and it first came to the Vineyard last fall. He has also had several exhibitions of his paintings, and has come out as a strong advocate for mental health awareness. 

While 300 Paintings calls on the author’s experience as a comic, it is no mere stand-up routine. At 80 minutes it has the dimension and scope of a play. There are serious undertones, yet there are many undoubtedly funny parts: We hear how at his most grandiose Kinssajukian thinks of himself as a “Pisscasso” who goes through a blue period in days, rather than years. At another point he describes how he affected a beret. Funny or serious, he is always charming and engaging, and he breaks it up by showing projections of his work.  

There are times when the dialogue takes on the rapid, pressured speech of a person who is manic, and his thought process shows the jumping from topic to topic that a psychiatrist refers to as “flight of ideas,” But this feels intentional. At no time do you worry that the performer does not have it under control. And he readily attributes this to his rapid diagnosis and treatment by a psychiatrist.  

At the end of the performance, Kissajukian announces that a curated exhibition of his paintings is on view in the lobby, and that he will be available to meet the audience.  

Two Paintings by Kissajukian

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Web image provided by Sam Kissajukian