>>PREVIEW
BALANCING ACTS
Stage Left Productions and One Yellow Rabbit
Runs November 29 to December 3
Big Secret Theatre (Epcor Centre)
If comedy is the best medicine, Alan Shain certainly isn’t overlooking its therapeutic value.
The Ottawa-based funnyman will be treating local audiences to his personal brand of heartwarming humour when he performs at the Big Secret Theatre for the fifth annual Balancing Acts disability arts festival.
Shain, who has cerebral palsy and is working towards a master’s degree in social work, never thought of pursuing a comedy career until he won third place in a Yuk Yuk’s standup competition in 1989. After that, he was encouraged by family and friends to make the most of his comic talent.
Since then, Shain has taken his comedy act across North America and to Australia. He’s a favourite at conferences, schools and universities and holds the distinction of being the only Canadian artist invited to the 2000 Paralympic Arts Festival in Sydney, Australia.
Stereotypes about the disabled bothered Shain while he was growing up in Ottawa, leading him to conclude that he was going to have to be the one to change attitudes.
"I had to work at getting past people’s nervousness at my disability," he says. "Particularly, I found people were nervous around my speech – they would not understand me and it took me a lot of effort to speak. Because of that, I found people won’t talk to me at first, or won’t approach me. So, I had to be the one to take the first step with breaking the ice."
And there’s no better way to break the ice than by making people laugh. Shain puts his audiences at ease by tackling the kind of embarrassing questions they might secretly want to ask him: Do wheelchair people ever go to the bathroom? Are all wheelchair people related to each other? Do they ever think about sex?
Shain says working as a disabled comedian has its challenges, especially when many comedy clubs have no wheelchair-accessible entrances, bathrooms and stages.
"The only problem at one (Ottawa) club was the stage had one big step," he recalls. "So I had to convince (the club owners) that they could help me walk up onstage and sit me in a chair – which they did."
But mishaps have occasionally happened, such as the time Shain fell off the stage when a juggling act went wrong.
"When I fell off the stage, they (audience members) were all freaking out and two of them ran onstage and put me back in my chair. All I kept thinking about saying when I got myself composed was, ‘That was not supposed to happen.’ So, from that moment on, I tried not to stand up when I do standup comedy."
While Shain is a spokesperson for breaking down disability stereotypes, he prefers to be considered a comedian first and an activist second. He’s also branched out into playwriting, with a one-act comedy, Still Waiting for That Special Bus, that has received critical acclaim. The play is a semi-autobiographical story about a disabled man who wants to go on a date, but has to wait for a wheelchair-accessible bus to pick him up. Shain performed it in Calgary at the inaugural Balancing Acts festival.
This year, Shain is bringing a pair of performances: Smashing Stereotypes and a storytelling show entitled Folk Tales. He’ll perform Folk Tales on December 1 at 7 p.m. and Smashing Stereotypes on December 2 at 9 p.m. He joins a festival lineup that also includes Vancouver physical-theatre artist S. Siobhan McCarthy with her show about mental illness, Altered States – Primal Scream; Calgary’s Inside Out troupe with a series of improv skits called Maestropiece Theatre; and fest organizers Stage Left Productions with Notwithstanding, a centennial-themed show examining Alberta’s eugenics practices over the past century. For more information on Balancing Acts, go to www.stage-left.org/festival.htm |
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