Episode 8: Neil sits down with...Disabled American Theatre Director Evan T Cummings

Neil Hancock: 00:00:11
(Music) Hello, everyone.  I’m Neil on Wheels and this is my new podcast.  I can’t walk the walk but I can talk the talk.  I’m a wheelchair actor who wasn’t able to work during the pandemic but rather than sitting around doing nothing, I thought I’d sit around doing something.  In this series, I’ll be chatting to people in the theatre, TV and film industry about the challenges they’ve overcome in order to achieve great things in life.  In this episode, I’ll be chatting to Evan Cummings, a theatre director based in New York City.  Evan’s career consists of directing readings and developing other numerous projects for The Private Theatre and the Queens Theatre in New York as well as the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia.  He was also part of an international directors’ collective known as the World Wide Lab.  With them, Evan has co-directed his own original piece, Imperium, in Rome, Italy.  I could sit here listing more of Evan’s accomplishments but rather than hearing me speak, let’s hear from Evan himself in New York.  Hello Evan.

Evan Cummings: 00:01:15
Hello Neil.  It’s a pleasure to talk to you and thanks for asking me to be a part of it.

Neil Hancock: 00:01:21
It’s a pleasure to talk to you.  Now Evan, like me, is in a wheelchair and we met via some mutual friends of ours in New York when I was over there on holiday.  How have you been Evan?

Evan Cummings: 00:01:31
I’ve been well.  It’s, you know, this year has been one unlike any other in… certainly our recent history and that extends to yours and my experience in the theatre in the arts... certainly extends to health and safety and well-being of everyone throughout the world and you know I feel grateful that I’ve been well and working my way through this year as best as possible but I’m sad for and missing the kinds of theatre pursuits that we were able to explore before this pandemic came to all of our shores and still feeling positive and hopeful for getting back to some of that.

Neil Hancock: 00:02:17
I hope so too.  And how have you been keeping busy during this time?

Evan Cummings: 00:02:21
You and I haven’t talked in some time Neil and you got to know me pretty well as primarily a director.  I also have developed different projects as you say with The Private Theatre as well as personal individual projects... theatre related, but I actually have kind of been exploring the playwright side of myself a little bit more over the last… I’d say the last few years certainly but when directing opportunities became more scarce over the last many months certainly because we’re not able to come together in person, I kind of dove in and started to explore the writer side of myself in a way... a little more fully than I had been doing before so not only am I kind of figuring out what kinds of story I want to tell, I’m exploring different kind of forms and format.  I’ve been writing a book of a musical along with the lyrics and in addition I’ve been working towards basically a second draft of play that is written partially in verse as well as a new play that I’ve just been writing the last couple, gosh, I’d say couple weeks, maybe the last two months that’s based in a period of history here in the United States.  So that’s been trying to keep my mind busy and then in addition to some of that, I’ve been lucky enough to be teaching for a programme called The Theatre For All programme with the Queens Theatre as you mentioned.  It’s a wonderful theatre that’s based in a park way out from Manhattan, a good 45-minute, hour train ride... subway ride from Manhattan and I’ve directed there and worked there before but all of their programming has moved online and I had a joyful experience within the last couple of months of developing programming for their Theatre For All programme which is primarily actually supporting and lifting voices and artists who identify as having a disability.  So that’s just a variety of things that I’ve been trying to do to keep theatre going in my life even though it’s not happening in the traditional ways that we were experiencing before.

Neil Hancock: 00:04:56
Well, that’s a lot Evan.  As long as I’ve known you, you’ve always been one to keep busy I think is excellent.  Now, with the Queens Theatre, I noticed that you haven't let the pandemic stop you from working not just from a writing perspective but from a directing perspective because back in July 2020, I believe you directed a virtual reading of a play and I love the title of this play, Emily Driver’s Great Race Through Time and Space, and you did that for the Queens Theatre.  Now, instantly that’s got me interested.  What was that about?

Evan Cummings: 00:05:30
That was a really exciting new play.  It was actually a play that is... you know primarily was shaped and created as a play, a theatre for young audiences style play, but it actually is a really wonderful kind of family play, play for all ages I suppose I would say written by two writers, Gregg Mozgala and A.A. Brenner.  Both of them actually have an experience with disability in their lives and they had developed this project with a theatre company here in the States, the National Disability Theatre, which actually just within the year or two prior to the pandemic had been kind of starting to create programming that was... all aspects of each of their productions had an artist involved that was someone with a disability.  And so I was not directly connected with the project when it was a part of this National Disability Theatre but one of the writers, Gregg, reached out to me and said “We’re interested in exploring this play in a reading format online in celebration of the Americans with Disabilities Act.”  It was an anniversary for the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act which happened in 1990 and so the play actually is a fictional account of a young woman with a disability, a young wheelchair user, named Emily Driver and she essentially, she has a very vivid dream life, a fantasy life and she, one evening, is denied a new wheelchair.  I am somebody… somebody in government that wrapped red tape around things and keeps things from happening and through kind of this dream or fantasy experience, she learns a lot about the past advocacy and disability activism history and so, in the play, she gets to know a couple of people that are based on people that have been significant figures in the disability activism and Disability Rights Movement here in the United States and by the end of the play, not only is she standing up for her right to be be provided a wheelchair for her needs, specific to her disability, but she actually is kind of takes on the mantle as a disability rights activist in her own right through the inspiration that some of the characters give her throughout the play.  So it’s a really delightful experience to bring that to the awareness of folks.  In fact the play itself was supposed to have, through the La Jolla Playhouse here in California in the US, a multi-month tour but that got cut short at the beginning of the pandemic and so it was one of many plays that wasn’t going to be able to get the viewing and the hearing that it deserved and then it was planned on having and so we were able to share that a little bit wider by doing it as an online reading and the full cast was both people with disabilities and people without and the Queens Theatre is really supportive to projects in that vein that kind of explore the, not only the history, but different perspectives as to stories of disability and recognising that stories of disability are universal stories that reflect on things that we all experience whether we have a disability or we don’t.

Neil Hancock: 00:09:24
That sounds absolutely superb and I wish I could've been over in New York to have seen it or well indeed seen it on Zoom if I’d had known about it as it was happening because that sounds like an absolutely fantastic show Evan.  Now, interestingly enough as I was hearing you talk, I was thinking to myself, how do you find directing a show virtually as opposed to being in the rehearsal room with other people, other creatives?

Evan Cummings: 00:09:51
It was a brand new experience for me particularly with that project in July.  That was my first time bringing all of the elements of directing and of bringing a story to the… to an audience whether that’d be fitting in theatre seats or as part of a way of sharing it online.  It actually… part of it is actually kind of figuring out what the director’s toolbox is and recognising that in this circumstance, some of what is expected of a director is some of the technical elements, you know?  Recognising that...And my aunt likes to say that, “Boy, it feels like we’ve lived 5 or 10 years in this year 2020”.  That it’s… that every month is a new year and I bring that up because even some of the technology, the… whether you’re on Zoom or you’re in FaceTime or other different platforms where you can share this, some of things that we… that I was considering when I was directing it back in June were, you know, what character is going to show up in the top corner of the screen versus the bottom corner of the screen and does everybody have a similar microphone or are they… or is one person being heard a little bit less and one being… person being heard a little bit more.  An additional thing that actually has even struck me as funny is considering the online platform.  You and I, you know I wonder if you might have recognised this over these last many months but when we enter a room or go in and start a rehearsal in a rehearsal studio for a theatre project that the kind of idea and visibility and aesthetic of our being disabled, of us being a wheelchair user, that’s obvious when we come into the room and the thing that I found is I've actually… I’m proud of my connection to disability rights and to exploring stories of disability in my theatre work and yet if I’m appearing  on the square screen on the camera, you’re not really seeing my wheelchair.  And so I actually, I had to call attention to the fact that I’m a wheelchair user if I want people to know that and here we were doing a play that had multiple wheelchair users in the cast and the idea behind the story of the play is somebody is trying to get a wheelchair for themselves but you’re not necessarily seeing that on the screen and so how do you acknowledge that, what do you choose as far as kind of a limited number of props or different kinds of things that you can do with the technology, creating a digital background, that kind of thing.  Those are all considerations that you have to make for a Zoom performance, for an online performance that never come up when you’re doing an actual stage project or the choices are different, you know?  It’s… with you doing a reading, it’s who stands at what music stands of if you’re doing a full production, it’s… are you coming in from stage right or stage left?  Those things kind of go out the window when you’re doing an online performance.  But then of course, things like the character work and the dramaturgy of the story, those are all consistent whether you’re doing a stage production or you’re doing it online.

Neil Hancock: 00:13:30
And which do you prefer in an ideal world, I mean I know you’re like me, you love live theatre and you love being in the room but are there advantages to doing it over Zoom that you wouldn’t have necessarily in live theatre? 

Evan Cummings: 00:13:45
Yeah.  Well I think there’s one big one.  I would say unequivocally I prefer live theatre in a theatre space or in a space that has been made to be a space for an audience and for actors and everything happening live in front of you and as I say I’m hopeful and really anticipating and excited about the day when we can get back to that.  But there is one big advantage to much of these being done in a digital space and that’s access and accessibility.  You… I know you may have even experienced when you were here in the States and I’m sure you’ve experienced in a lot of your opportunities and theatre related productions and projects where you are in England that not every space has wheelchair accessibility, you know?  And so if I’m coming into a space that even in a circumstance where it might be a space that an actor with a disability, an actor that’s a wheelchair user can get on stage.  I’m the director and sometimes that means I can sit in every seat of the house in order to take a look at sight lines and being sure that I’m anticipating each audience member’s experience of the production.  You know sometimes I can even get closer to the stage than the back row and so often that is an experience of interpretation or anticipation of what a different audience member in another location is going to be experiencing whereas in the online space, we’re all having a similar experience of watching something on a screen and we may have different speakers or we may have different size of our tablets or our laptops or our televisions but you don’t actually have to worry about getting into the space and I feel like that’s one of very few kind of benefits and upsides to the digital space because otherwise, I love the live theatre and I love being in a live theatre and exploring storytelling in those spaces.

Neil Hancock: 00:15:56
So where does your passion to direct come from?

Evan Cummings: 00:15:59
Well it was… I’d say the answer to that is... it was both a short and a long journey.  I grew up in the western part of New York State in a city called Rochester or the suburbs of the city called Rochester and it’s a city in New York State but it’s a good six, seven-hour drive down to New York City and so even though I’ve now lived in New York City for over a decade, that’s where my family is and that’s where I grew up and it was… there were some wonderful theatre both community style theatre as well as touring companies of different broadway shows that would come in to the big auditorium there.  And in addition, in the US as you have there in the UK some wonderful professional theatres in the spaces outside of the big cities.  So we have our big regional theatre kind of network and there’s a wonderful theatre called the GEVA Theatre, that stands for Genesee Valley Theatre and I ended up doing a young person’s actor training programme when I was 12 or 13.  It just happened to be actually within a year after I had my injury that caused me to be a wheelchair user.  They were starting a programme for young actors between 13 and 18 years old and so I had this wonderful opportunity to kind of get to learn about theatre and acting in a professional space and this theatre would do large scale main stage production.  They also had a smaller theatre within the same building, a smaller theatre space where they would do brand new plays often bringing people in from New York or Chicago or California and putting up a really first rate productions and to be learning theatre at the start from different people that had  had professional experience both in New York and on the regional theatre here, that got me to kind of be a little bit more open-minded and anticipate “Maybe this is something that I could do as a career.”  But for the longest time I thought that I was going to be an actor and there was gentleman that taught in the… in this summer theatre young actor training programme, that one year asked, “Hey would you be interested in…  I’m directing the yearly production of A Christmas Carol…” which well I’m sure we both know is a perennial or annual favourite whichever means.  It happens all over the place every single year around this time but he had asked, “Would you be interested in being a directing assistant on this production?” and I said “Yes but what is it about me that made you think that that was something that would be either interesting to me or that I’d have any skill at?” and he said “Well I’ve just been noticing as you’ve been doing your acting work, not only are you really smart about the way that you approach the different material but you tend to kind of have ideas for every other actor in the room.”  And not necessarily in an overbearing way or in a way that was slowing down the process where I was stepping in and telling actors how they should be acting but in a way that he could see that some of my perspective on theatre wasn’t just from an individual character standpoint.  And so I was his assistant director and it was one of the most fun kind of early experiences that I can remember.  And out of that, I said “Well why don’t I continue to explore this directing thing a little bit?” so I did production of the musical, Godspell, when I was a senior in high school.  I directed it at my, what we would call the junior high school, seventh and eighth grade.  And at the junior high school that I had also gone to and when I was in junior high school, I had acted in a production of Godspell and so I was bringing it to students and hopefully thinking of it, “Oh if I can bring this is then I might be the director of this then the students might have the kind of experience that I had” which was just really fun and getting to do a theatre production with your classmates, with people that were your friends and all of that kind of preceded my applying to Carnegie Mellon University which is based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania here and I had initially applied there as an acting student, as a candidate for possible acceptance as a musical theatre student but a number of people that I’d gotten to met.  I did like a pre-college programme and a number of people that I had met in the year before I was applying to college were in the directing programme at Carnegie Mellon and a few of them kind of said a similar thing to that director that brought me on for the Christmas Carol.  They said “All right, well, you know, go for it and apply to the acting programme but we really think maybe you have a mind for directing as well so you might want to consider applying for that programme which ultimately I did and ultimately I was not accepted into an acting programme and I was accepted into a directing programme and found it to be the case once I arrived at the school that that was the right fit for me and that… even though I enjoy the acting than being in a space… even in the earliest years of my theatre conservatory training there at Carnegie Mellon recognising there are people out there that are actors in their blood and that have… just have the knack for it.  And I don’t feel that I ever had that particular knack for it but I did feel like I belonged in the theatre and ultimately through a couple of those circumstances as I just described found that the directing side of things was actually where I was supposed to be all along.  And so I’m glad… I’m glad it came through in that way because otherwise I may be still searching for the right spot for me, you know?

Neil Hancock: 00:22:48
Well, absolutely.  And I didn’t know you could sing Evan.

Evan Cummings: 00:22:53
I have not sang in a long time.  I would not put myself up against any professional musical theatre performer but for many years since I was growing up, I did enjoy it and it’s the kind of thing that I like coming back to around this time of year and singing Christmas carols around the house or certainly I am a fan of and interested in the side of the theatre that is musical theatre in addition to non-musicals but you’re not going to get me to sing on here and it’s been a while since I’ve done it in any official format but it was a part of my life at one point, that’s true.

Neil Hancock: 00:23:35
You mentioned a Carnegie Mellon University, now were there any other people in wheelchairs at the time you were there?

Evan Cummings: 00:23:42
That’s… it’s such an interesting question and it’s almost on automatic that I would be able to say “oh no” that it was so rare that I experienced that.  But funny enough, it… there was a gentleman, a guy named Brian Balcom who remained somebody that I am in touch with to this day.  I actually just spoke on a panel about disability artistry with Brian a couple weeks ago for an organisation here in New York called the Art New York which is a wonderful supportive organisation for a number of different professional theatres of all levels in New York City.  And he was I guess a junior when I was a freshman at Carnegie Mellon so two years ahead of me and he was a wheelchair user.  He was paraplegic and so used a manual wheelchair and I’ve always used a power wheelchair but the… to be honest you know and I would hope places like Carnegie Mellon and places here in the States like, say, Juilliard or NYU or a number of these really wonderful actor training programmes that exist here in the States might…  Even to this day, I think what I’ve recognised is a lot of the representation, disability representation, if there is any at all, was on the… either the directing side of things, playwriting side of things, less often in their acting programmes.  And honestly, from…. all that I’ve seen that remains to be the case, it’s infrequent that some of these top actor training programmes are… well, I mean frankly are accepting students that are going to be their kind of main actor pool who are people with disabilities.  I know there’s somebody that I worked with for that production, Emily Driver’s Great Race, who is, as far as I understand it, the first wheelchair user to be accepted into Yale’s actor training programme and so it’s a place where I think representation is lacking and it’s a place honestly where I think… some of my perspective is there’s some imagination lacking as well because… and often people will say… and Neil, I know you as such a fan of not only theatre but film and television, you would have recognised that for decades there were characters with disabilities that were not being played by actors with disabilities and that remains to be the case although I feel like it’s getting to be less so but some people, honestly, and sometimes I say the people that lack the imagination to… or the kind of drive and effort to go out and find the actors that would be right for their project that… are actors with disability.  They might say “Those actors aren’t really out there.” and the truth is they are to a certain degree but also the training opportunities aren’t as available and forthcoming for people with disabilities as they are for others and so I think that’s a long-winded answer toward your question but essentially suggesting the representation is lacking, the opportunity is lacking and yet small, small changes seem to be happening now that are changing that in little ways and I think that’s a real positive.

Neil Hancock: 00:27:37
Absolutely.  I believe it is improving very slowly Evan.  Now, you are a member of The Private Theatre in New York, how did you first get involved with the company?

Evan Cummings: 00:27:49
Through a wonderful director, former actor also producer that I think we both know, Neil, a guy named John Gould Rubin.  Really great guy and John pretty much knows everybody in the New York Theatre and a lot of people in theatre across this country and in your country as well as other areas of the world as well and I’d gotten to know John through a… another wonderful theatre company here called the LAByrinth Theatre which began a number of decades ago as a theatre for Latinx identifying actors and artists and has since expanded to be diverse and varied theatre company with a number of different projects that they do every year and I got connected to them actually through the actor, dearly departed may he rest in peace, Philip Seymour Hoffman who I’m sure you know through any number of films that he did while he was still with us.  He actually grew up in Rochester, New York and that was where I was from and through knowing people who knew people, I ended up getting connected with Phil Hoffman and getting to meet him when he was actually on a holiday vacation up to Rochester as was I when I was still in college and so we got to know each other a little bit and Phil was the director for a number of different LAByrinth Theatre productions that John Rubin had produced and… so Phil got me connected with John and John asked me to assistant direct on a couple of projects that he had been doing with the public theatre here in New York and John is not only a great guy with a really wonderful theatrical perspective but he is somebody that is… has been constantly interested in bringing up… giving opportunity to and showcasing the voices of young people, early career directors and actors and kind of bringing them into his circle and offering opportunity for acting roles or for assistant directing or for design not only when he was working with the LAByrinth Theatre but in this company that he created called The Private Theatre.  And so basically after I had assisted John on a couple of different productions, he said, “Would you be interested in becoming a member of my theatre company?” and I was honoured to have been asked and it really has been one of my most kind of joyful and exciting groups of collaborators in my work in the theatre... is the constantly evolving private theatre and the different kinds of projects that we’ve pursued over the years as a company of…  I think we’re eight, nine, ten of a membership now so it’s a real small company and things in a COVID year make it difficult to pursue the kinds of programming that we had been developing prior to this year but we’ve maintained connection.  We meet almost weekly.  And so for John to kind of bring me into his fold has allowed me to meet a lot of other wonderful people and continue to collaborate through that company.

Neil Hancock: 00:31:30
Fantastic.  And as you say, we both know John Gould Rubin.  He’s a fantastic director and is a nice, nice, nice man.  And since 2010, you have been part of an international directors’ collective called the World Wide Lab.  You met these different directors at Lincoln Centre I believe.  What gave you the inspiration to start this company?

Evan Cummings: 00:31:53
That a great question.  And I’m very impressed, Neil, you’ve done your homework so well.  I feel like you know more about the things on my resume than I do.

Neil Hancock: 00:32:04
(Laughter)

Evan Cummings: 00:32:07
The thing that actually inspired us to try to put together this theatre company was… was this particular experience with the Lincoln Centre, what they called the Lincoln Centre Directors’ Lab which I believe up until this year had been a yearly summertime gathering of directors from all over the world essentially in the basement and offices of Lincoln Centre for the last 20 years or more.  And so I was a part of the group that came together at Lincoln Centre for this lab in 2010 and participating that year were… basically it was 70 directors so 69 other directors from… not only from New York, a number of them from New York certainly, a handful more from the United States but I had colleagues, people that became friends of mine that were coming from as disparate places as Australia, South America, all over Europe, from Russia, from goodness what ended up being the company that we put together, we have a director who’s based in California but has cultural history and family from Delhi in India.  We have an Italian director, an Israeli director from Tel Aviv, a Taiwanese director who works in and directs in Taipei, another director who grew up in Taiwan and directs primarily Berlin, in Germany and on and on and on.  And so the thing that kind of inspired us was we were all coming together with our different cultures and our different backgrounds and our different experiences and some of us at different levels of our directing careers, I was one of the younger participants in that lab programme the year that I did it but by the end of a three-week programme, we looked around and said, wow, there’s something really exciting here where we can recognise, not only did we come together to kind of talk about different ideas and kind of discover what the experiences of being a director in different parts of the world but also that there might be something really dynamic and wonderful and exciting about bringing different cultural perspectives, different approaches to directing from different countries and different backgrounds.  Finding a way to bring that all together into a kind of festival or collaborative project and so we ended up developing further ideas for that out of that 2010 lab.  In 2011, we went to this wonderful retreat centre called The Watermill Centre which was created by Robert Wilson, an American director, who is known the world over and has a space that he offers to applicants who apply for a space and for development time.  And in the further years out of that, we ended up producing this kind of World Wide Lab Festival first here in New York, in Brooklyn and then a number of different engagements where we would all come together for about a month every year and explore work that reflected on the communities that we were in and those communities were communities where each of our members were living and working throughout the year before coming together and so places like Rome and places like Berlin and places like Taipei.  And so I travelled to Rome, I travelled to Taipei.  Gosh, it was four years ago last month that we were in Taipei developing and working with primarily young and early career actors that were both professional and students and building up projects that really invested in that idea of what is it to bring a number of cultures together and to try to express what that combination of culture is through collaborative directing which is an unusual thing because most often there’s one director but we were either pairs of directors or, in the instance of Taipei, in a way we were actually working all together, a group of 10 of us and not only exploring the cross culturalism that came out of the storytelling but the kinds of approaches to directing that came out of being collaborative in the directing role rather than a single directing role that brings all the other collaborators together.

Neil Hancock: 00:36:46
Now, we spoke earlier about accessibility and it playing an important part in how we can access a theatre and things like that, but I wanted to ask you what has you’re your greatest challenge either in your career or in life or even both?

Evan Cummings: 00:37:06
Boy, what a question.  I mean I think and you may understand this better than most others that I might talk to about the challenges but I think there is an inherent challenge in not only physical access to the spaces where we make theatre and as I said earlier, there are certainly a number of places still in New York City theatre that I can’t access easily but I guess I would say… I wonder if some might assume that one of my greatest challenges was my injury and the circumstance that put me… caused me to be a wheelchair user and that was a moment that was a part of my life and that was… I think that has shaped me but I wouldn’t necessarily consider that moment and the aftermath as the single greatest challenge.  I certainly think it was a challenging and difficult moment for… more for the people around me in a way than it was for me, for my family and the people that I was close to.  But part of that ends up being kind of…in a way kind of questioning what allows for opportunities to come along in this theatre and artistic world that we live in and what are the… where are the blockades that keep that from happening and I feel like as you said in the start and I appreciate it, I do my best to be as active as I can be and to kind of constantly be digging into my creative side and be sure that that’s being challenged and being worked and being, you know, I’m getting my exercise as far as creative output and exploration but it’s a big challenge to get work you know honestly.  It’s a big challenge to allow yourself to find the path towards kind of rising to the top of the pile, you know?  Being kind of that unique voice and perspective that people want to see more of what you’re creating and hear more of the plays and projects that you are exploring.  And I think to a degree, that… the… I guess we would say here, I don’t know if you term it similarly, the kind of freelance directing life that is… it’s difficult to maintain and you don’t know where the next job is coming from.  And to a degree, sometimes there are circumstances where I don’t know if physical access to a theatre company is making somebody, an artistic director at a theatre say, “You know we’d really love to kind of get...put Evan's play out, but it would be a challenge or it would expensive to be sure the he has housing that has accessibility for him or our theatre space is not accessible” and therefore we’d need to consider what the steps we would feasibly be able to make in order to give him the experience and the opportunity to be the kind of collaborator in the space that is not a question when people without access needs are participating in a project.  That kind of thing, I feel like it tends to be challenging only in the way that it… or most specifically in the way that it sometimes can cause you to second guess yourself.  You’ll say, “Well I feel like I have a perspective and I have a particular talent or point of view, I wish more people saw that.”  And I don’t know if any of this is… is the stuff that you can identify with or if I’m making any sense here but that is kind of a roundabout answer to your question.

Neil Hancock: 00:41:44
Well, what I would usually… what I would usually is… ask is how you’re overcoming this but actually this whole interview has basically showing how you are overcoming these challenges by achieving what you've achieved.  But you mentioned about your accident for example now, may I ask how your accident happened and how you ended up in the wheelchair?

Evan Cummings: 00:42:09
Yeah, certainly.  Yeah, I mean and I recognised in my adult life that sometimes people are nervous to ask what the circumstance is and I know that there are others with particular disabilities that don’t like to necessarily talk about their experience.  I’m not one of those people.  I’m open to sharing and the fact is I was a kid, I was a teenager.  I had essentially a fall in the snow or rather a jump in the snow.  As I said I grew up in western New York and the… my city and town were...are area of the US that gets a whole lot of snow every winter and so I was in junior high school.  It was a couple days before my 14th birthday.  It was the day before Thanksgiving which we celebrate in late November here in the States as I’m sure you know and I was home alone and school had been cancelled for the day for a snow day.  Funny enough, today as we speak across sections of the US certainly here in the northeast, we just had a big snowfall and so some school was cancelled in the last 24 hours here.  That was what had happened way back when I was a teenager and I decided to kind of wrap myself up in a hat and a coat and jump out into a pile of snow in my backyard and so I opened up the kind of back door, sliding door that we had in my childhood  home that was maybe a couple feet above the ground and I thought that the soft snow would kind of cushion my fall so I did sort of a belly flop they say into the pile of snow but the force of the fall pushed my head back and essentially caused two of the bones in my neck to break and severed the spinal cord and so…

Neil Hancock: 00:44:33
Crikey.

Evan Cummings: 00:44:34
Yeah.  And you know the strange thing is I’ve often said, it’s the kind of thing that we do when we’re young kids, jumping into the pool or running around with your friends, that kind of thing and I probably could’ve maybe done that jump a hundred different times and maybe not had the kind of injury result but it was just an element of that day and an element of the way that I fell and the scariest part about it was my mother was working, my dad had taken my sisters to an ice skating lesson down the road and so I was alone in that snow bank for, we’re not even sure how long.  It could’ve been as much as an hour but my father and my young, young sisters they were, gosh I think six and eight at the time, came home to find me in the cold snow in the backyard and so the scariest element of it was what if I hypothermic, we were then… was rushed in the hospital and we weren’t even necessarily sure if I would make it through the night but the… my cold body temperature was the most concerning thing at the start and once they were able to kind of warm me back up then they turned their attentions to the fact that I had broken my neck and had lost movement from my chest and below.  But the reason that I say that it was just one element of my life and not the greatest challenge is honestly from then on, it is a part of my identity, it’s part of my experience but I was involved in the theatre before I had that injury and within six months after I went to a physical rehabilitation centre in Atlanta here in the US and started to learn how to kind of do things in a new way certainly as I was going to live the…  life experience in a wheelchair from then on.  I also jumped right back into pursuing different theatre opportunities and in a way kind of looked at it as, “Well, this is just a part of me now.” but I don’t want to let it slow me down you know and…

Neil Hancock: 00:47:08
Well it certainly hasn’t done that, Evan, at all.  I mean from all you’ve talked about to me so far, what you’ve actually done is quite incredible I think.  What I wanted to know though is we’ve explored how these challenges and experiences have helped you grow in a professional way.  How has all this helped you grow personally?

Evan Cummings: 00:47:32
I think part of that... a partial answer to your question is it took me a little while to figure that out, to actually kind of figure out what my personal, what my friendships would be like and if they were affected by this kind of turning point in my life, what was out there for me as far as someone that would love me and accept me for me and on and on when an injury happens in an earlier moment in life.  I was just in my 13th, 14th, 15th year as I was becoming a teenager, I was learning how to live in my body again in a new way and therefore the kinds of things that we experience when we’re going through junior high or high school and making new friends or flirting with girl in your class and all of that stuff kind of went out the window because you have this kind of greater priority of how do I go through my day and my physical world every day in this way that’s brand new and that is difficult.  So I feel like the main kind of perspective that I’ve had on kind of the personal side of things is allowing myself to be open to people that accept me and see me for me and that can be the creative side of myself as well as just like my personally and the way that I… my perspectives on the world and so I have a wonderful partner of four years now.  Her name is Jennifer and she’s one of the people that I kind of push myself to, let her see and understand and accept me and I feel... you know, in a way, I feel really seen.  And she’s also a director actually and so not only do we have kind of similar creative perspectives but we have somewhat similar experiences of trying to find work and opportunity of having different creative collaborators here in New York and so I feel like… honestly I feel like each step and each stage of discovering myself and figuring out who I was and getting to know myself in a way as you’re growing up, I couldn’t have skipped past any of those steps you know.  As much as you’d want to, I had the teenage experience that I did and I… you can’t ask for or wish for a life that’s different from the life that you’re living and have to kind of grab onto it and figure out what you’re going to do with it and so I hope that’s an answer that takes into account the creative side of things but also just kind of the ways that I guess I would say if anybody’s experiencing a kind of challenge and these kind of moments in their lives that make us take perspective, I was lucky enough to recognise and to experience the fact that there are people out there that get me and that find the ways that I think about things as ways that they think about things too.

Neil Hancock: 00:51:20
And finally Evan, what would you like to achieve as your next step to help you grow even further as a director, writer?  Would you even like to go into film directing for example?  And if so, would there be a part for me?

Evan Cummings: 00:51:35
Neil, there is always a part for you.

Neil Hancock: 00:51:37
(Laughter)

Evan Cummings: 00:51:38
Honestly, whether there is or not, I definitely hope that we can stay in touch and I want to collaborate with you again some time as soon as possible.

Neil Hancock: 00:51:50
And on that note, Evan Cummings, thank you so much for being a guest on the Neil on Wheels Show.

Evan Cummings: 00:51:56
It’s a real pleasure Neil.  I was hoping that we’d get to catch up and just chat at some point whether it was recorded or not but this has been an absolute pleasure to get to check in with you and to be one of the early participants in your podcast.  I think it’s thrilling the ways that you have been able to consider different conversations that will explore your perspective and your side of things and the part of the world that you’re in.

Neil Hancock: 00:52:28
Well, it’s been great catching up with you as well Evan.  Take care.

Evan Cummings: 00:52:32
Thanks, my friend.

Neil Hancock: 00:52:33
This episode was recorded in December 2020.  Since then, Evan’s recent directing credits include Trust by Steven Dietz at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, an evening of short plays for Lincoln Centre’s restart stages and his own play, Emergency Planning for Roundabout Theatres Reverb Festival.  Evan is also a member of the Roundabout Directors Group for the 2022- 2023 season.  Evan was also recently brought on as the director and coordinator of a new division within the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, the Division of Artistic Access and Inclusion.  If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, please follow me on Twitter @NeilOnWheelsPod or Instagram, theneilonwheelspodcast.  Until next time.  (Music)