Nineteen years ago, actor Anne Gridley noticed she was having trouble moving. The 29-year-old found herself randomly losing her balance. When she performed on stage, her legs felt stiff, like they had weights on them. "It was sort of understood, like, 'Don't ask Anne to stand on one leg, it's not going to happen,'" recalls Gridley. "My balance was getting worse, and I'm like, 'I wonder if I have what my mom had.'" She did.

Her mother and her grandmother, and now Gridley, have a rare condition called hereditary spastic paraplegia. It's an inherited disease causing degradation of the upper motor neurons, resulting in leg stiffness and trouble walking. Gridley describes her legs feeling so heavy now that walking feels "like going through mud" that's thigh-high. The HSP will eventually cause Gridley to lose the ability to walk—though it won't affect her life expectancy. This two-time Obie Award winner is teaching audiences all about her condition, and learning how to live with it, in her new show Watch Me Walk. Produced by Soho Rep and presented at Off-Broadway's Playwrights Horizons, the critically acclaimed show just got extended to February 15. 

And yes, in the show, audiences see Gridley walk, in her unique way—halting, swaying side to side, her feet barely lifting off the ground. At times, she falls and we gasp. But she immediately reassures us, saying, "I promise to let you know if I’m not fine. It might happen again. It’s okay! Being disabled always includes an element of chance."

Gridley is a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, an experimental theatre company who has taken their work all around the world—one of their most ambitious pieces was Life & Times, a 16-hour-long show that recounts the mundane life of one real-life 34-year-old woman.

When Gridley was first diagnosed with HSP, one of the first people she told was Nature Theater director Pavol Liska. After she said to him, "I might not be able to walk one day," Liska reassured her, saying he would work with her no matter what happened. 

For Gridley—who had never fit into traditional acting types in commercial theatre, who thrived when getting to create and star in experimental work—it was a relief. "Thank God I work in a type of theatre that is accepting like that," she remarks. "Most of the work that I am in outside of Watch Me Walk is work where people ask me to do it. If I were, like, showing up at auditions, I wouldn't get cast. But I am fortunate that people just say, 'Oh hey, we would love for you to be in this show.' So they already know me."

It is that close community of downtown New York theatre artists who encouraged Gridley to tell her own story. After she was diagnosed with HSP, Gridley started joking that if she ever made a show, she would call it Watch Me Walk. One day, her friend, choreographer/director Annie-B Parsons, called her bluff; Parsons told Frank Hentschker, the executive director of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at CUNY, that Gridley had a show—Hentschker asked to put on a work-in-progress version of it at the Prelude Festival in 2023. Soho Rep quickly stepped onboard to commission the full thing. 

As Gridley lightly observes: "It all started with a joke and oops, people took it seriously and just so here we are."

But that playfulness is also important to Watch Me Walk as a whole, which isn't a one-woman show; there's also song-and-dance numbers, confetti, moving backdrops, two hunky ensemble dancers, and a very visible stage management team—always ready for that element of chance. Gridley is aware that audiences who come see a show about disability don't expect to laugh; they might even feel uncomfortable doing so. Says Gridley: "I love things like that, where you set up an expectation and then you subvert that expectation. And I love secret surprises and big theatrical gestures, and dumb theatrical gestures, too, like gobos and confetti. It brings me joy."

Like any autobiographical show, Gridley is brutally honest. She talks about how much she misses running and jumping. She talks about the way she is constantly infantilized because of her condition—strangers like to guess what kind of disorder she has (they're never right) or give her tips on how to walk better. She talks about her family: her mother who died of dementia, her father who died of a heart attack. She talks about her struggles with alcoholism and getting sober during the pandemic via a 12-step program. 

Says Gridley: "With the harder, emotional stuff, I think that's something that everybody can relate to. Not everybody has suffered or undergone that amount of loss. But most people, if we're lucky, we'll lose somebody that we love. I hope it just opens up the possibility for joy—not in having lost somebody, but in carrying on after."

And that joy is just as important in Watch Me Walk as sadness. In one charming bit, Gridley does a slide presentation about her canes, or as she prefers to call them, "walking stick"; she has a stick for every mood, and she names them, such as a gold and sparkly one she calls "Tina Turner." That humor serves to educate, and sometimes disarm—in one song, Gridley dresses up as Little Orphan Annie and sings about how she has an "orphan disease," a disease so rare that there is no funding for research about it, while dancing alongside two men with ripped muscles whom she calls Adonises; they pick her up and spin her around.

"My mom often said, 'I just wish I had, like, four hot men to carry me around on a berth,'" laughs Gridley. "Thank you for the idea, Mom!" Though she can't run, she can still dance.

Though Gridley inherited HSP from her mother, she also wants to make clear that the disease isn't what defines them. Says Gridley: "When I'm confronted with bad news or horrible things, I will make a joke. I will laugh about it. I will find the light somehow in there. I feel like that's my survival strategy ... What I'm realizing doing this play is, all of the gifts that I've inherited, too—like, I didn't just inherit this disability. I've inherited a perspective on the world, and I've inherited all of these good things from my parents. And doing this has helped me see that more clearly." 

In one of the most remarkable sections of Watch Me Walk, Gridley climbs up a ladder, sings a song, and then jumps from the top of the ladder into the arms of the Adonises. Gridley admits that she gets a thrill from making the audience anxious for her well-being, saying playfully: "Because the ceilings of this theatre here at Playwrights Horizons are not as high, so the ladder can't be as high. Because I would love a 50-foot ladder, just climb to the top and make people freak out, being like, 'Oh no, there's a disabled person on a ladder, and I'm worried.' I love getting that kind of anxiety."

By taking risks on the stage, and getting truly personal with an audience, Gridley hopes to remind everyone that "the disability community is the only minority that you can join at any time. If you're lucky and you live long enough, you will appreciate a ramp. You will appreciate accessibility. I was lucky to grow up with a mom who was disabled, so I always clocked, 'Oh, these aisles are too narrow, a wheelchair couldn't fit through here, or there are two steps up to that door.' ... Other people don't go through life thinking about that. They don't think about it until it affects them personally. So hopefully, with the show, although it won't affect people personally, maybe they will open their eyes and consider like, 'Oh, hey, that's not accessible or this could help somebody.'"

And as for Gridley herself, she hopes that after this initial run of Watch Me Walk, she will tour with it around the country and the world like in her Nature Theater of Oklahoma shows. As for the future with her disability, she is choosing to take whatever happens with grace, and plenty of jokes. Chuckles Gridley: "If Watch Me Walk is quite popular and gets extended and gets tours and whatever—and it comes to the point where I have to use a wheelchair, then I'll just change the title to Watch Me Roll. It's fine."

close gallery

0 of

Photos: Anne Gridley in Watch Me Walk Off-Broadway

Next Slide  

You may also like

• 
  Photos: The Royal Shakespeare Company's Cyrano
• 
  Photos: New Photos of All Out: Comedy of Ambition on Broadway
• 
  10 Cool Frozen PLAYBILLDER Covers