Review: All of Me, New Comedy About Disabled Lovers, Flashes With Wit and Romance

Romantic comedies have a well-known formula: two people meet cute, start dating despite resistance from loved ones, things get serious, there’s a sudden rupture and period of loneliness, but it ends with a grand gesture that unites the lovers. Laura Winters’s play All of Me, presented by the New Group, follows this structure devotedly, with one crucial change: the romantic leads are both disabled (and played by disabled actors); one uses a power wheelchair and the other a scooter, and they both use AAC (alternative and augmentative communication) text-to-speech devices. Though All of Me takes us down a familiar path, by focusing on disability, it encourages us to look at the genre anew to see who often gets left out.

When Lucy (Madison Ferris) meets Alfonso (Danny J. Gomez) outside a hospital, they flirt it up. They communicate via AAC, so the play productively forces the audience to adjust to disability time and become comfortable with the temporal contours of AAC: the pauses, the pacing, the nonrhythmic syntax of the digital voices, as well as the facial expressions, physical gestures, and chair choreography. In all of this, nondisabled audiences and their normative timetables and expectations about communication are eschewed; here we are on Lucy and Alfonso’s schedule – one of the many ways this play and this production centers disabled perspectives, embodiments, and experiences.

Lucy lives at home with her mother Connie (Kyra Sedgwick), sister Jackie (Lily Mae Harrington) and brother-in-law Moose (Brian Furey Morabito), all of whom care for her. As opposed to Amy Herzog’s Mary Jane, All of Me showcases bad forms of care, most clearly in Connie, whose caregiving, while coming from a place of love, is in almost all respects terrible. She constantly obsesses over Lucy’s pre-disability life and career as a singer, seems to think that prayer, will-power, and physical therapy can miraculously cure Lucy, and won’t acknowledge the worsening condition of her daughter — and herself (she has chronic back pain but is too embarrassed to use a cane and positively refuses to consider herself disabled). Through Connie, Winters teaches the audience a great deal about disability, language, accommodation, accessibility, and ableism in an integrated, natural way that never feels didactic.

Tied intimately to its depiction of care is the issue of class and the ways it intersects with disability. Lucy’s family struggles to make ends meet, so Lucy’s accessibility needs are often not met, symbolized best by the janky wooden ramp in their house. Alfonso, on the other hand, comes from wealth and has a high-paying job; he has his own, fully wheelchair-accessible home and a caregiver to cook for him and drive him around. This causes some tension between Connie and Alfonso’s mother, Elena (Florencia Lozano), who also clash over their philosophies around disability, their role as mothers, and their adult children’s dating life.

Any good rom-com has a hearty dose of sexiness, and though disabled characters are most often de-sexualized, Winters makes the political choice to show us disabled characters having active sex lives. In one particularly great scene, Lucy and Alfonso get separated by Lucy’s front door, which Alfonso’s chair can’t fit through (a clever, disability take on Pyramus and Thisbe); from either side of the door, they tell each other what they want to do to each other sexually, a sort of side-by-side sexting that despite the lack of physical touch is decidedly R-rated, and is also filled with some very amusing situational comedy, with Connie asleep just a few feet away.

This scene is representative of just how well-crafted the play is. All of Me is structurally tight, has well-developed and complex characters, and explores disability issues with nuance, all while being genuinely hilarious. Winters does something rare in the comedic playwriting world, successfully including multiple styles of humor, from Lucy’s dry sarcasm, to Alfonso’s dad jokes, to the brash quips of Connie and the high-tax-bracket satire of Elena. Ferris is a tour-de-force, using her humor as both defense and attack. Gomez and Ferris are like a perfect wine-pairing, balancing and rounding each other out. Lozano nails Elena’s elite disdain, and Sedgwick is first-rate, capturing Connie’s pain, her exhaustion, and her problematic wishes for her daughter all within a performance that is decidedly hysterical and endlessly watchable.

Ashley Brooke Monroe’s direction subtly allows the play to nail its emotional pathos without ever falling into the dreaded tonal traps of disability representation: it never feels like cheap “inspiration porn,” never becomes maudlin or saccharine, and never has the disabled characters be sources of pity. Lucy and Alfonso have agency, and their perspective and feelings are always prioritized.

Rom-coms end right when the couple re-affirms their love. We never see beyond this, and in most cases, it’s quite difficult to picture what that would even look like. All of Me ends with their loving reunion, but invites us to think about Lucy and Alfonso’s lives beyond the final curtain, and by extension, to value the very idea of disabled futures. While Connie is unable to envision a future for Lucy beyond a miracle cure or being a greeter at Walmart, Alfonso helps Lucy think more expansively about college, careers, independence, romance, and a fulfilling, long life — not an ending, but an on-going, and extended, ever after.