THIS MAGAZINE: BECAUSE EVERTHING IS POLITICAL

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April 01, 2009

ThisAbility #22 Are We There Yet?

Posted by Aaron Broverman at 03:06 PM ET

"Keep control gentlemen, keep control." Ah, the sound of the stern classroom reprimand of yore, really takes me back. I have to remember though, I'm not a student in this group (even though I don't look a day over 15 to most people). However, I am a little jealous because this group of junior students from Streetsville and Mississauga secondary schools has arrived at Toronto's Lorraine Kisma Theatre for Young People to see Are We There Yet? for the first time.

Back when I was in school, sexual education started in grade one, with a purple and yellow rooster puppet named Rusty, who counseled kids on inappropriate touching (some psychiatrist somewhere is definitely making a living off of stories about this puppet). In the later grades, there were PBS specials featuring a camera up the birth canal and a repetitive jingle that's still stuck in my head, "My body's nobody's body but mine/You have your own body, let me have mine." There wasn't anything like Are We There Yet?

Edmonton's Concrete Theatre has been touring this award-winning play for grade 9 students to schools across the country for 12 years. Many of the students who've seen the show over its history, have come back to tell the company how the play helped them navigate sexual pitfalls later in life, or prevented an early pregnancy. They've performed in front of kids with special needs before (for a deaf audience, it took two hours just to do the first half), but the heavy participatory nature of the play itself, means its different for every audience who sees it, and every cast who performs it, every single time.

Today, the students from Streetsville and Mississauga just happen to have Autism or Asperger Syndrome and I'm playing the part of Jane Goodall, the outside observer. A piece of all of us here (cast, crew, me) is excited to see how a highly interactive sex-ed play would play in front of this audience. Actually, the fact that we assume it could be remarkably different(even the fact that I'm writing about it now) says more about us than it does about the students in the audience.

Autism: The Musical probably set the current standard for the public as a window into the arts as therapy for autistic children, but (surprise, surprise) today's show wasn't full of uncontrolled outbursts or complete emotional shutdowns typical of autism's public face. So, if this isn't going to be a blow-by-blow of the challenge faced by cast members in kid wrangling, why did it make ThisAbility this week? First of all, the attitude that we should even be educating people with disabilities (much less those with mental disabilities) about sex, in a way that isn't disability specific, is still much rarer than it should be.

Are We There Yet? represents the blatantly correct assumption that disabled people are, and continue to be, sexually active, so they should be educated sooner rather than later. If anything, the fact the students had autism and aspergers enhanced the experience, as many of them had insights and perceptions beyond even the adult test audiences early in the show's run.

Disabled audience or not, Are We There Yet? attacks the subject matter in a way that nobody I know of has. Penned exclusively for schools by playwright Jane Heather and directed this time by one of Concrete Theatre's founding members, Mieko Ouchi, the show operates from the premise, "What if sex-ed was taught in the same public way as drivers-ed?" Suddenly, words like "headlights", "stick shift" and "glove compartment" are rife with sexual innuendo; even the act of driving is one big double entendre. However, this aspect is rudimentary compared to the level of participation the play demmands from its audience. The show's cast of two men and two women (Ryland Alexander, Nick Green, Monice Peter and Nadien Chu) each play characters trying to navigate their personal boundaries, or wondering how to bring up the topic of using condoms with their partner. In each scenario, they're turning to the audience for help.

Great, nobody knows more about personal boundaries than these students. Personal boundaries, and how not to violate them, is the first day issue of every special ed class I've ever sat in on. Once it was established that the characters on stage didn't want to break up, the level of frankness and practicality with which the teens in the audience dealt with relationship issues, shocked many of the people on stage, and many of the teachers in the back row. You could hear it in the momentarily bewildered "How do they know this?" tone coming from the actors when taking the student's suggestions.

It's because of a precocious kid in the front row, who suggested to the character uncomfortable with putting on a condom that he, "make it entertaining and add some whipped cream," I learned that whip cream is okay for play because it's water soluable, but Cool Whip is not because it's petroleum based and will break down the condom. Sure, Shawn Fowler from Planned Parenthood Toronto filled in the gaps, but if it weren't for my buddy in the front row, the topic wouldn't have been on the docket for discussion. So, my friend, if you're sitting in your school's computer lab right now and seeing this, here's a cyber fist bump straight from me to you.

Like most of us who see Are We There Yet?, by the time they get to the part where you get to create your own teen guy (if you're male) and teen girl (if you're female) you're already so invested in the process that you legitimately want to see your boy succeed in his relationship, like some proud parent. The students from Streetsville and Mississauga took this coaching responsibility to the nth degree, with one going as far as role playing to Nick (the actor) exactly what he wanted him to do. Many of them became adamant enough to channel Cus D'Amato as he trained Mike Tyson, or Burgess Meredith when playing Mickey Goldmill in Rocky. I actually saw a student massage Nick's shoulders and literally say, "Get in there!"

Sometimes the students were so passionate, the actors had trouble keeping up with the suggestions. Creating their ideal man or woman by shouting out characteristics, quickly became a verbal Jackson Pollock painting. Suggestions were thrown out every which way and then the group sat back to see what stuck on stage, admiring their work through the organized chaos of its creation.

In a way, Are We There Yet? shows kids that when you first start out, sex is just that, (barely) organized chaos. So, who better to contribute to the performance, than a group of students who are pros at learning how to deal with the chaos in their own heads on a daily basis?

Aaron is a freelance journalist living in Toronto. His work has appeared in Financial Post Business, Investment Executive Newspaper, and TV Week Magazine, along with Askmen.com. He is a regular contributor to Abilities Magazine and is currently plotting a weekly web comic called GIMP, with artist Jon Duguay, about a handicap school bus driver who wakes up after a crash to find he's the last able-bodied person on earth — and he's being hunted.

More entries on: ThisAbility

Previous: ThisAbility #21: Faking it
Next: Queerly Canadian #9: House-proud?

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