TINY BEAUTIFUL THINGS Reveals the Size of Phamaly's Family

There are 115 disabled actors in Phamaly Theatre Company’s upcoming production of Tiny Beautiful Things.

On any given night, only one will perform live. Actors Jessica Erin Swanson and Adrienne Asterita alternate in the role of Sugar, the anonymous advice columnist created by Cheryl Strayed. The other 113 performers appear in prerecorded videos as the people whose letters Sugar answers.

Adapted by Nia Vardalos from Strayed’s collection of her Dear Sugar columns, Tiny Beautiful Things moves through stories of love, grief, sex, family, loneliness and trauma. Despite a cast composed entirely of disabled artists, very few of those stories are explicitly about disability. Asterita estimates that among the 113 letter writers represented in Phamaly’s production, only one discusses disability directly.

“It’s about love and heartbreak and trauma,” director Stacey D’Angelo said, “but it isn’t about disability love and heartbreak and trauma.” Disability, she added, can be part of someone’s life without being “their full scope of identity.”

That distinction is central to what Phamaly is attempting with its enormous cast. The 115 performers haven’t been gathered to illustrate 115 experiences of disability. They are lending their faces and voices to the much broader range of experiences that brought strangers to Sugar in the first place.

“Everyone just gets to feel,” Swanson said.

Making room for that breadth of experience, though, first requires making room for the artists themselves.

Asterita’s path to Phamaly began with a question of whether she belonged there at all. Friends had encouraged her to audition for years, pointing to experiences including Bell’s palsy, anxiety and ADHD. But Asterita didn’t identify as disabled. Phamaly was a theatre company for disabled artists; she wasn’t convinced that meant her.

Then she encountered Phamaly’s audition form. Alongside questions about accommodations, transportation and accessible script formats, the form asked whether she identified as disabled. But it didn’t force her uncertainty into a yes-or-no box. There was an option to say, essentially, I want to talk about it.

Asterita checked it.

The conversation that followed was not about whether her particular collection of diagnoses cleared some threshold for admission. Artistic Director Ben Raanan told her Phamaly didn’t believe in a “disability hierarchy.”

“I can tell you without a doubt, you belong here,” Asterita remembers him telling her.

“I remember reading it and just, like, bawling my eyes out,” she said. “‘I belong here.’”

Belonging at Phamaly also meant learning that she didn’t have to quietly manage her needs in order to stay there.

Asterita described the initially disorienting experience of working with Phamaly’s Production Accessibility Manager AJ Watson, who repeatedly asks performers what they need. She repeated her standard, ‘I’m fine,’ until he asked her enough times for her to realize the question wasn’t merely a courtesy.

“Oh, you guys, like, really mean it,” she recalled realizing.

That expectation is built throughout Phamaly’s process; rather than asking artists to minimize their needs in order to participate, the company expects needs to occur and simply rolls with them.

Swanson calls it “normalizing your normal.”

And that practice has an intriguing parallel in Tiny Beautiful Things. Sugar spends the play responding to people facing problems she often cannot solve. Her role isn’t necessarily to repair the person on the other side of the letter.

Swanson distilled it to: “I see you. I hear you. Here’s how I can relate.”

It’s an unusually natural fit between a play and a company. Tiny Beautiful Things is interested in people whose lives cannot be reduced to a single experience or identity. Phamaly approaches disability with similar expansiveness: disability may shape what an artist needs in order to work, but it doesn’t have to define what stories they tell, what roles they play or how fully they belong in the company.

Which begins to explain how a single production came to include 115 disabled performers.

The 113 prerecorded letter writers weren’t assembled through a massive new search for disabled actors. They include current Phamaly artists and company founders, former performers who moved away years ago, artists who can no longer commit to a conventional stage production, collaborators connected through Phamaly’s international work and people whose disabilities or living situations have otherwise made performing difficult. One participant lives in a nursing home and cannot leave to attend the production; the video format means he can still be part of it.

Some of the connections stretch back decades. Others exist largely by reputation: artists know one another’s names or work without having met. The production brings those different generations and edges of the company into the same project.

D’Angelo described that network as something Phamaly never really sheds.

“You could be a founder and still be associated and part of the community,” she said. “It grows and it builds.”

“It’s enormous. And it’s a connected community that you don’t ever leave.” Swanson adds.