Ryan J. Haddad Claims His Spotlight and Access for All

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The views and opinions expressed by speakers and presenters in connection with Art Restart are their own, and not an endorsement by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts and the UNC School of the Arts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Ryan J. Haddad is an actor and playwright whose work across theater and television consistently challenges outdated narratives around disability, queerness and identity. He made a striking Off-Broadway playwriting debut with “Dark Disabled Stories” at The Public Theater, which enjoyed a sold-out, extended run and earned him the Obie Award for Best New American Play. His autobiographical solo show “Hi, Are You Single?” has become a defining part of his artistic voice, touring nationally and earning critical acclaim. Ryan’s television credits include memorable appearances on Hulu’s “A Murder at the End of the World” and Netflix’s “The Politician.”

In addition to performing, Haddad is a dedicated writer and access advocate. His essays have appeared in The New York Times and Out Magazine, and he is a contributor to the anthology “Disability Intimacy,” curated by Alice Wong. His creative work and activism have earned him a Drama Desk Award, a Paula Vogel Playwriting Award from Vineyard Theatre and a Disability Futures Fellowship. He is also a proud alum of the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group.

In this interview, conducted just a few days before he premiered his latest solo piece, “Hold Me in the Water,” at Playwrights Horizons in New York City, Ryan reflects on the pivotal experiences that shaped his journey as an artist, from performing fairy tales in his childhood living room to commanding major stages and screens. He speaks candidly about navigating the entertainment industry as a gay man with cerebral palsy, building a career on his own terms and advocating for authentic representation and accessibility in the arts.

Pier Carlo Talenti: Performing solo plays is grueling, as you well know. It’s also incredibly vulnerable because it’s just you up there in front of an audience. For anyone it’s difficult, but I’m imagining that for a person with a disability, there’s an extra challenge. As you yourself have written, your body receives more scrutiny than most able-bodied bodies. I’m wondering if you can take us back to the first time you performed solo on stage, perhaps for an audience of mostly able-bodied people. How did that feel?

Ryan J. Haddad: The first time I performed in an acting class I was 7, and I was playing Rumpelstiltskin. But the first time I did it in my heart and soul, I was 5 years old, and my family was putting on Snow White in the living room and I was Prince Charming. There were all these years of doing either my family plays, which were an eight-year endeavor that we did together until I was 13, or doing these youth-theater/community-theater/school plays, that sort of run-of-the-mill stuff.

I knew that there were roles that I wasn’t getting because of the disability or that I was being cast in the roles I was getting because the disability was a better fit for those parts, but I never really felt scrutinized by the audience. I just was up there doing “Alice in Wonderland” or “Babes in Toyland” or “The Wizard of Oz,” that kind of stuff. Or our final Haddad theater production, which was “Andy” instead of “Annie,” when I played Andy at the age of 13. 

I didn’t endeavor to make solo work until I was a sophomore in college at Ohio Wesleyan. My brilliant professor and mentor, Dr. Ed Kahn, brought in his friend Tim Miller, who is an internationally renowned solo performer and performance artist and has been doing this for 40-plus years. 

Pier Carlo: A queer icon too, right?

Ryan: Absolutely a queer icon but also a wonderful teacher who has for many years been going around the country to do all of these wonderful residencies. Any university, any college, doctorate programs, MFA programs, non-educational … he does not discriminate who he believes is worthy of sharing their personal stories. It’s not like there’s a certain level of performer, or you have to be really good. His philosophy is anybody, anybody has a story that’s worthy of being told; it’s just about the permission to then tell that story. 

I did my first workshop with him at 21 as a sophomore in college and then did three more of those workshops by the time I graduated. After the second one, which was the summer of 2013, he told me, “Come to New York. I’m doing a residency commemorating the NEA Four. I’m doing a residency at the New Museum, and for mine, I want to do a performance workshop where other people will perform. It is not my performance; it is other people, and I want you to be one of the people.” That was the second time that I worked under him, as a student. 

After that he said, “OK, you have to have a full show by the time you graduate college.” I was about to start my junior year. I was like, “That’s so bizarre. A, why would you say that? B, who would listen? Who would watch an hour of me being me?” Guess what? A lot of people have. I’ve been doing it since I first performed “Hi, Are You Single?” 10 years ago. It started in this directing studio at my liberal arts college at Ohio Wesleyan.

Those first two nights were the first time that I ever commanded a whole room by myself. They were full houses, but they were full houses of people who mostly knew me. They were primarily non-disabled people because I was at my college where there weren’t other disabled people or at least visibly mobility-disabled people like myself. It was a very warm room. Everybody was really rooting for me in a way that was a really beautiful experience. What I remember most is my parents in the third row. I knew where their seats were. They had assigned seats because I was going to call on them.

Pier Carlo: [Laughing] Oh my God, poor parents. Parents of theater people, they go through it.

Ryan: They knew that it was a very sexy and sex-forward show of their 23-year-old son. I don’t know if they knew up to that point if he had even had sex or had any sexual experience. I remember sitting with them at KFC down the block from the theater — I don’t know why we were eating KFC before the show; what a horrible thing to eat before you’re about to go onstage for an hour alone — sort of warning them. And then they walked in, and my professor said, “How are you feeling?” They said, “We’re nervous.” 

I was looking at them the whole time. Every time that the audience would laugh, they would be wiping away tears, not because the jokes are bad. They were laughing because they knew the audience was with me and that I had that ability to command the room and that maybe I could keep doing this. They are two of my biggest cheerleaders. I’ve been performing “Hi, Are You Single?” for the entirety of those 10 years. The last time I did it was just recently in January in Vermont. I think my parents have seen it upwards of 15 times in those 10 years. Or more. Sometimes they would come days in a row if I was doing a multiple-performance run. 

That’s what I remember the most about the first time. It is what you said; it was a room full of mostly non-disabled people.

Pier Carlo: When did you know for sure you were going to pursue acting as a profession?

Ryan: It’s a complicated question. I wanted to pursue acting as a career from the time I was three years old, crawling around the living room doing Disney princess movies. I wanted to star on Broadway and be in the middle of a kick line and be a musical theatre showman before I even knew what Broadway or New York was. That was the childhood dream. The childhood dream was not autobiographical solo performance. My God, who is 5 years old and dreams of that? 

Pier Carlo: I’m sure there’s one out there.

Ryan: Maybe, perhaps. I didn’t even know. That’s the thing, until Tim showed up at Ohio Wesleyan, I didn’t even know that it was a possible path, that one could make a career of it, that people would want to keep coming, that that could create a body of work. Any of these things, I had no idea. 

I think the truth is that until Tim arrived, I had convinced myself through years of being hardened in school or community theatre where I was typecast as a teenager, based on my walker, and where I knew that I wasn’t ever going to be the lead or I wasn’t getting the lead — whether it was that I wasn’t good enough, thank you very much, or that I didn’t fit the mold of the roles that I wanted to play within the bounds of either musical theatre or the bounds of the plays that people do for teenagers to perform — I had convinced myself that, “Oh, this isn’t for me. I’m not going to make it as a performer. I better be a director or a writer.” 

And then it was Tim arriving and being like, “You should be a writer, and you are a natural-born performer. Just because you got tired of people waiting around to put you in roles that already exist doesn’t mean that there aren’t roles for you and that the character of Ryan can be a role that you play and play very well.” I think from sophomore year forward I was warming back up to the idea of “Maybe I can pursue performance acting as well as writing and creating and generating my own work.”

Pier Carlo: The first time I got to see you perform was in “A Murder At The End Of The World.” 

Ryan: Ooh, you’re a newbie!

Pier Carlo: I’m a total newbie. It was exciting to see you in a big high-budget TV show. In the 10 years since you came to New York, how has your career progressed? What have been the most positive surprises? What work has yet to be done? How have you managed to make this career for yourself?

Ryan: Look, it starts with advocates within your own community. It really does. I’m talking about the disabled community. There was an organization that no longer exists called Inclusion in the Arts. Two people who worked there were brilliant performers in their own right but also incredible disability advocates: Christine Bruno and David Harrell. 

I met Christine Bruno that same summer I came to New York to do the workshop with Tim at the New Museum. She knew of me. And also whenever a new young person is coming to New York who has disability, they look to the disabled people that they know and who have lived there to be like, “How does one live here? What is the way in which you could do that safely, accessibly, affordably?” Sometimes there are no good answers to those questions.

Pier Carlo: Right, because the infrastructure of New York is not necessarily built for people with disabilities.

Ryan: Not at all. But Christine was as helpful as an adult looking at a starry-eyed young kid could be and just told the truth, told it like it was, which is what you need to do because this is not an easy city. I adore her and love her; we’re dear friends to this day. Christine came to the very first performance of “Hi, Are You Single?” in New York, which was a one-night performance in August of 2015. Christine sees the first performance and is like, “Wow, he’s great,” and I immediately enter her roster. Inclusion in the Arts was the kind of organization where when people needed a disabled performer of any kind, they would turn to Inclusion in the Arts. Casting directors and producers would be provided with a list from which to build their audition pool.

My first moment on television was a principal contract, but I had no lines. Can you imagine, it was on “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” and the segment in which Jeff Goldblum was hosting on a fake Dr. Phil show that was called “The Superstars of Tragedy.” I auditioned for that. It’s hard to audition for something that has no lines. They were like, “Can you improvise?” and I just came up with the most offensive, the most upsetting disability jokes that I knew wouldn’t be used and would never be public but matched the tone of “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.” I knew what the assignment was, and I got the part. 

That’s how I can say nine and a half, almost 10 years working professionally because my first paying thing was TV within the first three to four months I moved here.

Pier Carlo: That’s amazing.

Ryan: I didn’t have an agent for playwriting for the first three years I was here, and then I didn’t have anyone representing me for acting really for four years. Then we get to the end of year four, beginning of year five, guess what? There’s a pandemic. [He laughs.] A lot of time is spent with, “Who do you know, who knows you, who can vouch for you?” It doesn’t mean that you don’t have to show up in the audition room and do your very best, and sometimes you’ll be right for it and sometimes you won’t, but if you can’t even get into the audition room to begin with, then there is no opportunity to be had. 

Pier Carlo: Once you do land a gig, whether in the theater or TV, to what extent are you comfortable sharing things about your character that may be inauthentic? Because I doubt most writers’ rooms have a person with a disability to write your character. 

Ryan: It just depends on the environment. It really depends on the environment and who is willing and who is not. You can take that temperature pretty easily, who is warm and welcoming and who wants your feedback, or who will be receptive if there’s a piece of feedback that they may not necessarily have wanted but that you have to give, you know what I mean?

Pier Carlo: Right. Because for instance, in “A Murder at the End of the World,” I noticed that their vision of the character’s mobility was different from your actual mobility.

Ryan: Yes. Well, that was also an instance of it being based on somebody that they knew, a friend of theirs. I want to honor that as well. If that’s where you’re coming from as a writer, I’m not going to say, “Well, I want it to be more like me.” I think it was justified because the character I was playing was this tech guru, and of course he would just want to ride around. He would want to be in the most technologically advanced device possible, and my walker, the same model of which I’ve been using since 1995, is not that. [He laughs.] There’s give and take there. I have no problem inhabiting other mobility devices. 

I think for me what it comes down to is, can I believably play this character who uses this device, but also is this device something that Ryan the human being is comfortable enough in to be able to do good acting? 

Pier Carlo: To what extent in any medium as an actor are creative teams open to hearing what your actual needs are?

Ryan: Oh, they have to be. Whether they’re open or not, you have to give it to them. That’s hard. It’s harder to be like, “I think the character should do this. I think you should rewrite the script to say this.” There are moments and there are people for which that is warmly welcomed, and then there are others who are like, “That is overstepping; that will not be happening.” 

Pier Carlo: Which you understand as a writer anyway.

Ryan: I do, and I say the same thing. My next play — there is no production commitment to it at all, so I don’t know when or where it will be — is a big family play where my whole family is onstage. We’ve developed that play for seven years, and I have the same hard boundaries for actors in the room. I am really open when it’s other actors playing characters who are real people in my life, but also they’re real people in my life. I feel like I am the authority on Bob and Judy Haddad, my parents. I am the authority on fabulous gay Uncle Charlie and brilliantly wonderful lesbian Aunt Janice, and so I will tell you that this is the way it will be done. Obviously, I have respect for somebody else’s creative vision of a character, but if something is egregious, I will raise my hand and say, “This is egregious.”

Now when it comes to Ryan’s access needs, I’m sorry but that is what needs to happen in order to do the work. That is certainly hard when you’re just starting out, to assert yourself and advocate for yourself, but it must be done because how are you going to do your best work possible if you cannot access the space, if you cannot access the environment or be given the tools in order to be able to show up?

Pier Carlo: I imagine you’ve taught other performers with disabilities.

Ryan: I have taught them when they’ve appeared in the classes I’ve taught. But not a whole class. I’ve done a couple of talks.

Pier Carlo: Do you also teach them about this advocating for yourself, about raising your voice? I feel like you have it in naturally in your character.

Ryan: I do that more when someone brings me in as a guest and I’m just giving them a talk about the industry. I don’t do it unless somebody raises their hand and self-identifies as disabled, and then I zero in on that person and really hammer it home because it has to happen. It just has to happen. I’m at a position in my career where I’m not afraid. I know the value that I bring. Whether it’s my own work and writing or somebody’s casting me in a show, I will say what I need to say.

I also have a great team around me now. I have a manager, and I have an agent for playwriting. They’re not afraid either, and so they’ll just say, “No, it’s this, or he’s not showing up.” Sometimes there’s give and take. Sometimes things are given, and sometimes they aren’t, but at that point then I have to decide, “Is this worth doing? Can I do this in these circumstances and conditions?” If I can, then I will. If I can’t or simply don’t want to, then I won’t. Access accommodations are really important. 

Pier Carlo: Playwrights Horizons has put in a lot of protocols to make your play as accessible to a wide range of audiences as possible. To what extent are you involved in that decision-making?

Ryan: As much as humanly possible.

Pier Carlo: Making a new play already takes up as much mental and creative space as possible.

Ryan: We’ve been planning. The production offer came in March of 2024, and we’ve been really deeply talking about access and what access offerings we could make available as early as June of 2024.

Pier Carlo: Is this part of your creative process? It’s really not an afterthought.

Ryan: It was a big part of the pre-production process. The thing is, what was being offered in “Dark Disabled Stories” was everything all the time, [laughing] everything everywhere all at once. That’s not what we’re doing here. We’re doing a variation. We’re doing the same kinds of offerings but at different quantities or at different frequencies. 

In my next play, the big family play, which is about my gay uncle — it’s called “Good Time Charlie” — I don’t know what access is going to work inside of a play with seven people onstage doing dialogue as opposed to doing monologues, like in “Dark Disabled Stories” and “Hold Me in the Water.” What I’m not going to do is promise exactly the same access all the time. But what I do think is exciting and what we’re trying to offer is, this is one way you can do it. This is another way you can do it. There are 10 other ways you can do it. You know what I mean? What we’re doing is demonstrating the kinds of access that are possible.

Once we get the offer for that production, we will then come back to the table and say, “What access works for this play? What doesn’t? How can we still offer as much access as possible while honoring the writing and honoring the form of the play itself?” 

What I hope to also be demonstrating even within my own body of work is that it’s not one size fits all. It’s not “This is the way it has to be done.” But I do really value options and the options that the Deaf and disabled community will have to be able to come in and choose from a number of performances as opposed to, “This is your one chance to experience ‘Hold Me in the Water.’” That feels wrong to me, and I hope to never do that in my own work. 

And yet it makes me think of when you asked, “Who’s comfortable when you’re hired to do another job?” That’s complicated too when I’m an actor because of course I want to continue the advocacy, continue the broadening-access opportunities, but also sometimes it’s not my play, right? I’m just there to do my job and go home. It’s hard when you’re just a member of an Equity acting company to be like, “Let me sit down with your institution and tell them all the things they’re doing wrong and how they could do better.” I haven’t quite found the way in to do that. 

I hope to be better at it, but also sometimes when I’m just showing up and being the actor, adding the other stuff is more of a job than is necessary and not the job I’ve been hired to do. But it is on my mind when I’m in a play that I am not a creative authority on, what are the ways that my community and sometimes in some ways my fans can still show up and access the piece?