AN UNEVEN MIND to Premiere at Glendale Main Library

Arizona Theatre Matters will present An Uneven Mind: Trauma, Creativity, and Inclusive Support, a new autoethnographic work by Jeanmarie Simpson, on Saturday, October 24, from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon at Glendale Main Library Auditorium, 5959 W. Brown St., Glendale. The work will be performed by Rosemarie Dombrowski, PhD, with a sign language interpreter on stage; Simpson will join the audience afterward for discussion and Q&A.

At the center of An Uneven Mind is a deceptively simple question: What becomes possible when conditions change?

Drawing on Simpson's lived experience and more than five decades in theatre, the work examines the contradiction between visible competence and invisible struggle. A person may be accomplished, articulate, creative, and professionally capable while also experiencing significant difficulty with memory, processing, regulation, observation, sequencing, or overload.

'Visible capacity. Invisible cost. Real accomplishment. Real struggle. Both things are true.'

Rather than asking only what is 'wrong' with a person who struggles, the piece turns attention toward the conditions surrounding participation: pace, clarity, sensory demands, predictability, processing time, emotional safety, and support. It also considers creativity as structure.

Simpson describes theatre as 'a kind of external nervous system,' using text, rhythm, rehearsal, cues, memory, and relationship to give form to experience that may otherwise feel fragmented. That inquiry extends to Arizona Theatre Matters' artistic practice: accessibility as part of the architecture of the work itself.

About Rosemarie Dombrowski, PhD

Rosemarie Dombrowski is the Poet Laureate of Phoenix and a poet, educator, editor, and public humanities practitioner. She is Founding Director of Revisionary Arts; Teaching Professor at Arizona State University; Assistant Professor of Practice at the University of Arizona College of Medicine–Phoenix; and founding editor of ISSUED: stories of service and rinky dink press.

About Jeanmarie Simpson

Jeanmarie Simpson is a playwright, actor, director, teaching artist, and Founding Artistic Director of Arizona Theatre Matters. She has worked in theatre for more than fifty years and has collaborated with Blind, Deaf, Elder, and disabled artists across performance and education.

About Arizona Theatre Matters

Arizona Theatre Matters creates performance, education, and artistic inquiry from a foundation of accessibility, including captioning, audio description, Deaf Artistic Sign Language performance, digital distribution, and collaboration with artists who have historically encountered barriers within conventional theatre spaces.