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”

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

Podcast

Web image provided by Sam Kissajukian

When the British band, The Who, released their double album, Tommy, in 1969, many of the songs in it became instant classics and served as anthems for the Baby Boomer generation ever since. The album was characterized as a “rock opera,” because when connected, the songs told the story of the “deaf, dumb, and blind kid,” Tommy. The storyline made possible subsequent musicals, first as a movie in 1975, and then as a Broadway play in 1993 and as a revival in 2024. Underlying the storyline in each of these genres are the psychiatric consequences of childhood trauma Tommy experiences. In this episode, we consider the psychiatric conditions Tommy exhibits through selected songs from the original Broadway production, and how they are used in education and training.

Dr. Anthony Tobia, who is the regional chair in the Department of Psychiatry at the Rutgers School of Medicine and is also the Service Chief of Psychiatry at Robert Wood Johnson Barnabas Health in New Brunswick, NJ. Dr. Tobia also holds a secondary appointment in the Division of General Internal Medicine there. His interests and scholarly work include the value and application of merging popular culture and psychiatry. The Who’s Tommy is among the many cultural works he has found helpful in depicting psychiatric problems for purposes of teaching health professions students and practitioners, and others in roles helping people with mental illness.

Links
Original Broadway cast album of The Who’s Tommy, 1993
Background on The Who’s Tommy movie, 1975.
31 Knights of Halloween didactic at Rutgers during October.

The Clinic & The Person is a podcast developed by our editor Russell Teagarden to summon or quicken the attention of health care professionals, their educators, researchers and others to the interests and plights of people with specific health problems aided through knowledge and perspectives the humanities provide.

Feature image recreated by Medhum using Tommy’s poster found on Wikipedia Common.

What could it be like to have dementia? We can’t know. But the arts can imagine what people with dementia could be going through, and many works have been produced for that purpose. We feature a literary novel (The Wilderness), and a play (The Father) and its movie adaptation, offering sophisticated renderings of dementia for consideration. In the course of our conversation about these works and how they imagine dementia, we include: how an illusionist was part of the creative team in The Father to produce a sense of disorientation among audience members; how the metaphor of “the wilderness” is used in the novel and more broadly in various texts from the beginning of civilization; and how well the psalm used in the novel worked and builds on the place of psalms as texts for understanding how people react when threatened by significant life events.

Featured Content Sources:
• The Wilderness, by Samantha Harvey, Anchor Books, 2009.
• The Father (play), Florian Zeller playwright, Doug Hughes director, Christopher Hampton translator, NYC Broadway 2016 + tour sites, London West End 2015 + tour sites.
• The Father (movie), Florian Zeller screenwriter and director, Christopher Hampton translator, Trademark Films, release date US – 2/26/21, available through many streaming services. 

Links:
Russell Teagarden’s associated blog pieces at According to the Arts: 
• The Wilderness: the novel and literary excerpts compared with biomedical text
• The Father: the play and the movie

Russell Teagarden’s review of The Father (movie) in the journal, The Pharos.
Podcast episode 6, which features dementia related to Parkinson’s disease and expressed through the poetry (sonnets) of Micheal O’Siadhail is here.
Background information on development of Alzheimer’s disease as an obscure and rare disease to a broad categorization of dementia: 
Claudia Chaufan, Brooke Hollister, Jennifer Nazareno, Patrick Fox. Medical ideology as a double-edged sword: The politics of cure and care in the making of Alzheimer’s disease. Soc Sci Med 2012;74:788-795.
Patrick Fox.  From Senility to Alzheimer’s Disease: The Rise of the Alzheimer’s Disease Movement. The Milbank Quarterly 1989; 67:58-102.

Feature image by Margarida CSilva