Featured photo by Jordan Best.
When he was 26 years old, Obie-winning playwright Ryan J. Haddad first fell in love. Now at 33, he’s reliving that romance all over again — and this time, the world gets to watch.
Haddad’s new play Hold Me in the Water is a solo show that’s sincere, silly, and sexy in equal measure. Two days into rehearsals for the show’s current off-Broadway run at Playwrights Horizons in New York City, Haddad told INTO about putting his own life on stage, the ways queerness and disability can push back our big firsts, and his hopes for the future of accessibility in theater.
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Hi, Ryan! I’m so excited to see Hold Me in the Water come to life on stage. Like your previous plays Dark Disabled Stories and Hi, Are You Single?, this new show is autobiographical. How do you as a writer decide which parts of your life to bring to the stage? What was the seed of inspiration for Hold Me in the Water?
All of my work to date as a writer has been autobiographical, and sometimes I take tons of disparate stories or events or occurrences that share a theme, and then I arrange them into a tapestry, and that is an evening of theater. And this was one of the first experiences for me that came out as a piece. It was like, “Oh, this is a whole story, and the characters are unified and the arc is unified.”
But even before that, even before I knew that there was going to be more to the story, in the early moments of what happened with this romantic experience and this other person, this other man — it was so unique. It was so different. I had never experienced anything like that kind of intimacy and connection without any of the other puzzle pieces of what would follow. I knew that even those early moments needed to be captured and told somehow and would become part of something, whether it was, like I said earlier, more of a collage piece — like, would this be a three-day experience in my life or a one-week experience in my life, and therefore merit three to five minutes of storytelling? Even if that was true, I knew, “Whoa, this is big and my life is taking a turn, and I am growing because of whatever is happening here.” And then I have to go forward and live it. I have to just buckle up and see what happens!
I tell this to my students of solo performance, that you need to live and process the experience and give yourself time in between the life and the events to then be able to mold it and craft it into a piece of artistic expression. Because if you’re too close, it’s hard to be objective and look at the whole picture, especially when you don’t even know what the whole picture is going to be. You might have run away in your head with a fantasy of what that picture was going to look like, or how it was going to turn out, but you don’t know until you know.
How do you balance yourself, Ryan the playwright and performer, with the version of you that audiences see, Ryan the character?
There’s some points in which there is no line. It’s like, these things did happen to me, and I take creative license when necessary for clarity of story. Without embellishing to the degree that it becomes fiction, because it’s not; it’s just creative nonfiction. And it’s also, you know, a piece of art and a piece of theater. But everything in all of my plays did happen, so far.
There’s that, but then there’s also, what does the character of Ryan, who I do separate myself — it’s not being hoity-toity or talking in the third person — but it is like, “In this play, he is this, doing this.” And I have to think of it as a character arc and a character objective and a character journey in order for the audience to then be satisfied by the narrative. And so there have been other plays where I have villainized myself at certain times or exposed myself in ugly and uncomfortable ways for the sake of telling the stronger story, or sometimes enhanced the sledgehammer of my own flaws, in order to make the point clearer and put the character through the wringer more than real life required me to do. I don’t make other people look worse, I make myself look worse, in order to reach a satisfying conclusion for the audience.
This is not one of those pieces. I mean, it’s really sort of tender and heartfelt and open. It is vulnerable, of course. It’s also very sexual and sexy. It’s very gay, and it’s very hot and erotic and passionate. Because I always want to sexualize my disabled body, the disabled body, the character of Ryan, in a given piece. Because I think we’re so often desexualized. That’s how I started at 21, 22, 23 with Hi, Are You Single? It’s like, “We’re so desexualized; that’s why I can’t get a date!” Well, this is a play in which I more than could get a date. And I embark on this really specific and sweet and special and earth-shaking, nerve-racking romance.
“I always want to sexualize my disabled body, the disabled body, the character of Ryan, in a given piece. Because I think we’re so often desexualized.”
– Ryan J. Haddad
Hold Me in the Water is, above all else, romantic as hell — but it’s also not a perfect fairytale love story. How do you define the genre of the play?
I think of it as a poignant romantic comedy, or a romantic dramedy. It’s even, in some ways, a coming-of-age. That’s not explicitly stated in all of the above. The coming-of-age stuff is not spelled out for you, but the truth is, I’m 26 in the story, and I’m experiencing all these firsts that some people experience when they’re 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, and 22. Leaving high school never having a boyfriend; going to college being like, “My boyfriend is right around the corner, I don’t have sex until I’m in love, but just in case there are condoms in my nightstand drawer!”; and then getting past college.
That’s sort of where Hi, Are You Single? came from, is that I got to be a senior in college, and nothing had really happened in my romantic life, and all I wanted since I came out as a rabid horny gay — I came out at 16, and everything was ideal in my mind that the boyfriend was coming, and with the boyfriend and the love would come the sex and all these things. None of that happened. So I’m 23, I’ve graduated college, and then I moved to New York. It’s very hard to be on a dating app in New York City, whether it’s a hookup app or a dating app, and be like, “I’ve never done any of these things,” or, “I’ve been waiting for a special someone in order to.” Not that everyone is having sex as a late teenager or in college, but the movies tell us that they are, and your friends as comparison tell you that these things are happening for other people but not happening for you, and you’re late.
But I think that delayed adolescence happens if you’re queer often and finding yourself. It also happens if you’re disabled and are working to access the joys and pleasures of your own body, along with combating the fear and, at times, discrimination that the external world places on your body or toward your body. And look, there’s some queer disabled people who just are out here f*cking! And that just was not me. And again, none of the coming-of-age stuff is spelled out in the play, but is very much what was top of mind as I was living this for all of these firsts related to this special individual.
Personally, I certainly picked up on the coming-of-age elements throughout the script — but I also relate heavily to those ideas of delayed adolescence, as will, I think, a lot of your queer audience members. What do you hope that audiences take away from Hold Me in the Water?
In many ways, I think this is my most relatable play that I’ve ever written. Because everybody, everybody — unless they don’t — but most people have a first love. I’ve done readings of this, just readings of me at a music stand, where people come up to me utterly weeping. And when this happens, I know that it has very little to do with whatever I’ve just said at the music stand, whatever I’ve just read from the script. Something in their own life, running in their mind simultaneously while I’m sharing this story from my life, has unlocked for them. And they are feeling it.
I want everyone to get swept up in my grand dream romance and the romances of their own lives, and feel everything with me, be on the ride with me, and while on that ride, understand the ways in which I very specifically in my disabled body — in my body with cerebral palsy, and my specific version of cerebral palsy — that this is how I relate to another person. This is how I connect. This is what I crave. This is what I look for, and this is what this experience and this big first, and the many firsts that came with it, afforded me and opened the door to in activating my body in ways that it hadn’t before. Allowing me to really feel the kind of physical and emotional connection I had always dreamed of, and knowing that it’s there, and knowing that it’s possible, and that it’s possible for all of us in all of our bodies and all of the stages in our lives.
“This is how I connect. This is what I crave. This is what I look for, and this is what this experience and this big first, and the many firsts that came with it, afforded me and opened the door to in activating my body in ways that it hadn’t before.”
– Ryan J. Haddad
This run of Hold Me in the Water at Playwrights Horizons also has an emphasis on accessibility from a production standpoint. In addition to select mask-required performances, American Sign Language-interpreted performances, and an enhanced audio-described performance, every showing of Hold Me in the Water will include some relaxed elements, including open captioning, open audio description, a break and movement space for audience members, and more. Why was accessibility a priority for you and the team at Playwrights?
I am part of the disabled community, and I am a theater artist, and I don’t want those things to be separated. I want more people to have opportunities to attend and be a part of a theater that is accessible to them, and I don’t want it to feel like a one-off, and I don’t want it to feel like an afterthought, and I don’t want to say, “You certain Deaf and disabled people are only welcome at certain times.” So it’s not everything all the time, the way that Dark Disabled Stories was, but it is another version and another set of offerings to say, “This community has had my back, and I’ve got yours.”
I think every play of mine will be different. I think what can be contained access-wise will depend on the story and the format and the medium, but it’s not something that I’m ever going to flush in the toilet and and totally get rid of and go back to zero, because there’s always a way, there’s always a way, to make something accessible. And I wish that more theaters would — and hope that more theaters will — continue to expand those offerings, both in the type of access that’s offered and the frequency with which it’s offered during the run of any given production, no matter the the artists involved. ♦
Hold Me in the Water runs through May 4 at Playwrights Horizons. Tickets and more information on accessibility are available here.
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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