Pericles for autistic people & refugee families

Over the past 25 years, I have seen about 4,000 live theater productions in my capacity as a Colorado arts journalist. On May 10 2025 I attended perhaps the most beguiling live theater performance of my life.

I had never seen anything like it.

The play was a short, groundbreaking adaptation of “Pericles,” and it was performed by Denver’s disability-affirmative Phamaly Theatre Company based on interactive principles developed over 25 years by Kelly Hunter, visiting artistic director of London’s Flute Theatre and author of a book called “Shakespeare’s Heartbeat: Drama Games for Children with Autism.”

This utterly unique experience, made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, started with Hunter and 10 carefully selected actors from Phamaly, each with disabilities themselves, performance experience and a demonstrated knack for spontaneous improvisation and human empathy.

After putting them all through essentially a boot camp on “The Hunter Heartbeat” method, the ensemble staged three weeks of performances in Boulder, Colorado Springs and Aurora.

The wild card: At each performance, up to 12 random persons with cognitive disabilities would be invited to apply in advance to fully participate in each performance. No experience (or rehearsal) required. That open invitation included persons with profound disabilities.

Those who were chosen were each partnered with two professional Phamaly company actors who acted as their caretakers by safely guiding them through every step of this strange, skeletal telling of a lesser-known Shakespeare story, and their important parts in it.

Dozens more, on the spectrum and not, came with their families just to watch and experience storytelling in a unique language that is designed to cut through all the noise in their heads. Many in this audience will come back night after night, no matter what city the performance is taking place in, because where else are these families going to find an experience so tailored to their child’s unique circumstances?

On this night, the performance was being held in the tiny studio theater on the top floor of the University of Colorado’s main theater building on the Boulder campus.

It starts on the way in

The audience has been told to gather in the basement of the university’s massive theater building, down where the box office and bathrooms are. When you do, you are greeted by Phamaly actors singing the word “Hello,” followed by the actual individual names of the 12 who have signed up to join them on stage that night.

Once inside the actual theater, you must imagine a circle in a square. The Phamaly company members guide their participating visitors to form a circle that essentially constitutes the stage. The rest of us – a cross-section of parents, friends and fascinated general theatergoers, take our seats behind them in a single row of chairs on each side, forming a square around them.

There are very few line exchanges in Hunter’s production. But each triad, consisting of a citizen volunteer actor and their two professional caregivers, will take turns delivering every line of dialogue three times or more – and you can see the citizen actors’ confidence and understanding growing each time. I likened it to the theatrical equivalent of listening to a Catholic Rosary.

Perhaps you’ve been told that people on the spectrum do not welcome being touched or being startled. Not here. In this calm sea of safety, these sensory-sensitive people quickly lose all inhibitions. They hug, they make silly noises, they ham it up right alongside their professional counterparts.

The play ends as it began, with the professional Phamaly actors gently preparing their guests to transition out of this welcoming world they have created and back to their not-always-welcoming outside lives. Now they are not singing “hello” but rather “goodbye.”

But by now, their real-life loved ones have joined them on stage. A massive dance party breaks out. The joy is palpable, for all of them. They arrived scared. They will leave forever changed. That means everyone.

“One night, someone had signed up to be on stage, but when he arrived at the theater, he got so scared that he just couldn’t do it,” Raanan said. “So instead, he sat in the audience and watched. Which was perfectly fine.

“But just as the play is about to be over – we had already sung our goodbyes – he decides, ‘OK, I’m ready to go,’ and he walks out onstage. And Kelly, without missing a beat, just changes the narration on the fly. She goes: ‘And now Pericles, as he begins to die, starts dreaming about all the things that have shaped his life.’ And we took that cue and literally just did the entire play over, just for this one guy (to have a chance to say the lines he had missed). All of the actors picked up on it and went with it. It was a beautiful moment.”

One unlike anything else you are likely to see on any other stage. Which made me more than happy to take my place as a stranger for a night in the place I call home – a theater audience.

“All any of us want is to be seen and known and accepted and loved,” Director Kelly Hunter said. “This play allows for any participant to have that, no matter what package your body is in. And there is such freedom in that. It’s vocal freedom. It’s physical freedom. It’s just freedom.”