Staging Disability: A Playwright's Perspective

Walker Brown was born with “an impossibly rare genetic mutation,” his father Ian writes on the first page of his beautiful memoir, The Boy in the Moon. “He is globally delayed and can’t speak.” Years later, when Brown saw his memoir transformed into a stage play, he described it as “an untraditional play that is also a public dialogue about…raising not just a disabled child, but any child."

Join JPL writer-in-residence Emil Sher as he shares his journey in adapting The Boy in the Moon for the stage. How do you give voice to an on-stage character who is front-and-centre but never seen? What fueled the decision to extend Walker’s world on stage to include his mother and his sister? Does a playwright’s toolbox have what is needed to convey unknowable pain? Where do disability and dramatic license intersect? 

Emil’s adaptation of The Boy in The Moon was selected as one of the top ten productions of 2017 by The Globe and Mail. As one critic noted, “This story gets right at the heart of why and how we connect to others, the investment we put into those we love that gives them meaning to us."