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”