When playwright Diana Burbano brought Sapience to Portland’s Artists Repertory Theatre two years ago, the company knew immediately that it wanted to stage it. The company had worked with Burbano when she contributed her Vertical City to its pandemic-era Mercury Company remote plays, and was excited to commission her new play in progress. 

But it also knew it needed help. The play isn’t “about” autism, but Burbano had written some parts specifically so that actors on the autism spectrum could play them. Director Melory Mirashrafi and the rest of ART’s team wanted to make sure those parts were cast authentically, and that the production would benefit from the perspective of neurodiverse people.

ART knew just who to call. 

The company had worked with Portland’s PHAME Academy on various projects over the years. For four decades, PHAME has provided classes and other programs as part of its mission to  empower individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities to lead full, creative lives through arts education and performance, according to its mission statement. 

“We were brought in to advise on the writing of the play because it features autistic characters, to make sure the writing supported the lived experience of autistic people,” recalls PHAME’s interim executive director, Chrissy McNair, a board member at the time. “ART jumped in with both feet.”

What began as an advisory role soon evolved into a full-fledged collaboration. The play developed through workshops at PHAME, and one of PHAME’s artists wound up being cast in a leading role in this month’s premiere production. Moreover, a phalanx of PHAMErs have been shadowing ART’s production team throughout the process, learning valuable skills through the kind of experiential education that no classroom exercise can quite provide. 

But PHAME students aren’t the only ones learning. Both onstage and off, ART’s production of Sapience, which runs through March 23, offers unexpected insights about inclusivity, communication, and connection. (Read Linda Ferguson’s ArtsWatch review.)

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Communication Expansion

Among other themes, Sapience  explores the complexity of communication in a diverse world. That’s something Mirashrafi, who is Iranian American, has experienced since childhood, seeing family members who were immigrants with accents or less fluency in English treated differently by some Americans than she was. 

“I came up thinking that the better you spoke, the more words you had access to, the smarter you were, the more worthy of doing theater you were,” she recalls. Then, “I found myself in a craft that emphasizes the literary aspect of a play, which I also love.”

In the course of her artistic journey, she’s returned often to certain related questions: “How we put so much emphasis on eloquence, and why does access to English determine how much you have in this country? What do we need to do so anyone can simply exist and be given the full respect for their humanity?” she says. “I’ve found immense value throughout my life in interrogating [those issues] onstage.”

Playwright Burbano has also explored issues of communication and identity in her work. She’s a Colombian immigrant who appeared in ART’s 2019 production of Isaac Gomez’s La Ruta, along with Cristi Miles, who also stars in Sapience.

Those questions pervade Sapience. “That’s at the core of this play,” Mirashrafi explains. “It’s not simply about somebody who is sometimes non-speaking. There’s a character who is an immigrant to this country and has a different level of access to English than her cousin, who’s a primatologist. She’s someone who doesn’t always have the capacity to speak another language, or speaks in a way no one expects her to.” It also examines “questions of identity at a time when that can be dangerous,” she continues. “But it turns out that another lesson is that we’re all more than a single identifying characteristic.”

In such a politically charged time, some audience members are understandably wary of “issue plays” that prioritize debate over drama. Some have asked Mirashrafi if Sapience is “a disability play,” she says. “But at no time is the play only about any of these things. It’s not about any one identity. They all exist at the same time. It’s also about love triangles, and how weird it is when you have to work with your ex — those kinds of inter social moments. Disability is just one added layer of specificity of the character.”

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Collaboration and Representation

Showing people with disabilities in all their fullness, beyond a single facet of their characters, appealed to PHAME, too. And so did the opportunity to give its artists skills and experience in local theater institutions, so that they can continue to work in the field outside of PHAME. In recent years, the academy’s artists have increasingly collaborated with other arts organizations, and drawn wider attention for the group’s increasingly ambitious programs. Read about how those collaborations unfolded in ArtsWatch’s coverage of its 2023 production of Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense, and its 2019 original rock opera The Poet’s Shadow, a collaboration with Portland Opera.

Former Executive Director Jenny Stadler and former Director of Performance & Partnerships RaChelle Schmidt headed up PHAME’s collaboration with ART through most of the development process. “ART was coming in with joy,” says PHAME’s Education Manager & Teaching Artist Laura Loy, who’s also a playwright. “There’s been a lot of bad representation of people on the spectrum in theater, and ART was determined to get our students’ point of view and our lived experience. We advised them in the early days [of the process], we did a read-through and workshopping, brought in a couple of our students before it was ready for casting and performance. So we’ve been involved in an artistic capacity from the beginning.” 

 This premiere production benefits from the early and continuing involvement of people with the lived experience of autism. “Our fingerprint is on it from the beginning,” says McNair. 

PHAME was also educating ART, with both teams learning “how do our two organizations work together on a project that’s this big,” says Mirashrafi. “We wanted to make sure we’re working together, and that ART was ready to accommodate this partnership and be ready to work alongside them. How do we partner in a way to give something back to an organization, not just [wave] the PHAME banner?”

 PHAME also ensured that the production proceeded “in a way that works for our students,” Loy says. “It’s a pretty simple transmission, a checklist of things to make your project and your space accessible. These are the things we know up front we need, and the rest is just listening.”

“We were so much working with what the students had to say,” agrees Mirashrafi, who directed the workshop and also taught courses on directing and more at PHAME last year, introducing students to the basics of the theater world, from how to audition to how a show comes together.  One of the participating PHAME students, Zachary Williams, auditioned for and won a major role in this ART production, and Mirashrafi emphasizes that “he’s not showing up as a PHAME student, but as a professional actor hired and paid by ART.”

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“Zach got confidence and contacts and connections through us and then was cast in a leading role in one of the most prestigious theaters in the city,” says McNair. “We’ve had students cast in productions before at this level, and it’s a beacon for students to live up to what they can do as well. Our goal is to work ourselves out of a job.”

Shadow Play

That mutual education continued throughout the production process after the PHAME workshops. For Mirashrafi, it goes far beyond casting a PHAME artist. “If we focus too much on what happens onstage — because what’s onstage is what’s seen, then representation stops at the stage,” she says. And so much of theater happens backstage, offstage, and long before opening night.

Accordingly, as part of a PHAME curriculum project, ART invited a cohort of PHAME students to accompany its backstage theater artists, as they took the show from script through initial design and tech meetings to final production. 

“It’s not an internship,” McNair explains. “Students in the cohort get to look under the hood, to be flies on the wall and ask questions. They’re shadowing and seeing all the different parts of the show, all the way through the final tech rehearsal. They’re getting to see all the not-so-glamorous parts that no one sees unless they’re in theater.” 

“Representation is more than having Zach on stage,” McNair continues. “They’ve collaborated with us on multiple levels, including the workshop and the education cohort. ART has taken this collaboration and allowed multiple students to grow and learn from it.”

As during the workshop process, education was a two-way process during the production. “For a lot of the cast and crew from ART, this was their first time to work with artists with disabilities,” McNair says. “It opens them up to  new perspectives.”

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What they find is that much of the process is the same as for any other show. In the past, some organizations would shy away from including people with disabilities out of imagined fears of the difficulty or cost of accommodation. Not this time.

“We do the same things” that happen in any show she directs, where almost everyone has different needs and approaches to doing their jobs, Mirashrafi says. “We talk about the play, rehearse the play, stage the play. All of the parts are kind of the same. It’s not like we’re accommodating anything super different. It’s about finding the right combination of people who are also interested in exploring what the play is exploring. That makes it easy. Everyone cares for each other.” Sapience’s lessons about not making assumptions and communicating across differences played out long before the curtain rose. 

“I’m hoping this becomes a model for other arts organizations to see how it was done and done well,” McNair says. “ There’s always an answer, always a way it can be done. That becomes evident when you bring people to the table who have that common goal. Then it becomes easier than you think. It’s truly having an environment where, like we say here, art is for everyone.”

Theater, which is an inherently collaborative medium, is an ideal place to put those principles into practice. “It’s multiple people, with the same goal and different backgrounds, all bringing multiple perspectives together,” McNair says. “Disability should be part of that conversation.”

Both onstage and off, this ART/PHAME collaboration holds crucial lessons that apply to all of us, too often trapped in our like-minded bubbles: “Keep yourself open to unexpected ways of connecting, new ways of communicating,” Mirashrafi says. “And don’t make assumptions about other people. People are deeper than you think.” 

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Sapience continues through March 23 at Artists Rep, 1515 S.W. Morrison St. in Portland. Find tickets and schedules here.

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