Wednesday, December 06, 2023
Broadway musical 'How to Dance in Ohio' stars 7 autistic actors
NPR: Even before the action of the Broadway musical How to Dance in Ohio starts, its seven autistic actors walk onstage – as themselves – and tell the audience about what they're going to see.
"If you've met one autistic person, you have met one autistic person," one says. The audience laughs.
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As an Ohio native, this article was extremely interesting and intriguing. I have never seen the documentary, but this article definitely made me want to watch it. What Rebekah Greer Melocik and Jacob Yandura are doing is incredible. Breaking the boundaries and stereotypes of what you need to be to make it in the industry and be cast in a Broadway musical is hard to do, but they smashed the boundary with a baseball bat and flattened the stereotype with a steamroller. The part of this article that impacted me the most was when they got asked the question, "Are the characters going to have an autism accent?". This is such an offensive question and just completely goes against the entire goal of the production, which is breaking any stereotypes people have about the incredible people who just happen to have autism.
I clicked on this article because I am both scared and intrigued to see how autistic people are covered in the news. First reaction: the creators and directors tried to define themselves by their relationship to an autistic person. Or even if the people did not try to justify their work on this show through their relationship to an autistic person, the article did. Outside of the quote from Yandura, who says himself that the documentary spoke to him because his sister had recently been diagnosed, for other people their autistic family member is only mentioned as an after thought. Not to say that they can't be motivated to work on this show because of their autistic family member, but the way the article introduced it felt strange to me; the structure to introduce the directors followed as: name of person, who has so and so autistic family member. I would rather hear a quote from that person about how their experience with an autistic family member motivated and inspired them to work on the show, rather than just have them listed as like a qualification. I would be less uncomfortable with this if there was an autistic person on the musical production team. While I appreciate the commitment to casting autistic people to play autistic characters, I wonder how much more genuine the show would be if someone on the production team was autistic as opposed to relying on autistic consultants who are only mentioned once in the article anyways. For an article whose title relies on the autistic actors for "shock value," I wish the article actually told more of the actors' stories instead of the story of the production team.
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