Springs to play role in Ping Chong Project's portrayal of disabilities

What do you think of when you hear the word "disabled?"
 
Meeting the Challenge, a local company devote to the disabled, and TheatreWorks want to make sure you think of people first.

Next season, the companies will collaborate with the internationally renowned Ping Chong Project to create a play - a series of monologues, really - based on the stories of real people dealing with disabilities in Colorado Springs.
 
Right now, though, they're looking for people who might want to participate. That's men and women of diverse ethnicity, age and disability - or support people like parents, husbands or daughters. No performance experience is necessary.

The Ping Chong company will come to Colorado Springs in June to interview the best candidates and begin to develop the script that the six or seven performers will eventually read on stage.

Project director Ping Chong calls the form "reality theater."

"These aren't superheroes," said Randy Dipner, co-founder of Meeting the Challenge and project linchpin. "These are real people, getting by day to day and doing what they do."

A board member for more than 14 years, Dipner has been waiting a long time to find a project that fit the TheatreWorks mission. He found it in June 2008, when he saw the Ping Chong Project perform a similar piece on disabilities in Washington, D.C.

"I know about disabilities," Dipner says, "and when I saw the performance in D.C., I was stunned."

The process of creating the play, which will be directed by Ping Chong, will be filmed and the final film distributed to the nine other Americans with Disability Act information centers in the United States. The play opens on Oct. 1.

Ping Chong's work was certainly a draw for TheatreWorks, said executive director Drew Martorella. "He's a name."

But so was the opportunity to present "real experience and real stories in a dramatic way."

"You can't put someone on stage just talking about their lives," Martorella said. "It's not very interesting. But Ping can shape these stories to create a theatrical event that is ultimately both moving and fulfilling."

Contact the writer at 476-1602.