Disobedient Bodies: Kimberly Levaco & Me
Michael Iskander (lying on floor), Justin Cooley, Victoria Clark, Nina White, Olivia Elease Hardy and Fernell Hogan in Kimberly Akimbo. Photo by Joan Marcus
by Sarah Weissman, Guest Editorial
Unlike Broadway’s current unconventional ingenue, sixteen-year-old Kim Levaco (Victoria Clark in a Tony-worth performance), my own teenage body didn’t age at four times the average rate. In Kimberly Akimbo, based on book writer and lyricist David Lindsay-Abaire’s 2000 play, Kim has a disease similar to progeria, but Lindsay-Abaire intentionally doesn’t name it.
In videos with the cast, they make sure to emphasize its fictionality. Unlike Kim, nobody predicted my life very well could end at sixteen. Still, in very different ways, both Kim and I couldn’t come of age normally.
I missed out on a traditional marker of adulthood. My personal cocktail of disabilities, all invisible— ADHD and lack of spatial motor skills garnished and enhanced with generalized anxiety—prevented me from even attempting a driver’s license until my twenties. Driving should be freedom, independence, and maturity; how do I mark those elements of my life? I have my license but refrained from using it until recently, and I continued to ask these questions.
My disabilities caused struggles in school and landed me in Adaptive PE in middle and high school. One of the more excruciating elements was that for the beginning of Adaptive PE class was sharing a gymnasium with the “regular” classes in the same period. To quote Kim, I felt “like a freak on display,” which was also how I felt when I shared a class with those kids in my earlier years.
This was before I heard the phrase “invisible disabilities” or even “neurodivergence” or learned to perceive marginalization as a systemic issue. The posture, arms akimbo (hands on the hips and elbows outward), has been tied to disobedience. I smile at the thought of Kim and me, whose disease also includes respiratory illness, as classmates in Adaptive PE together. Two sharp minds whose bodies won’t obey us. I would have found solace in her as a teen, but I am thankful to have encountered her in adulthood.
I know “akimbo” relates to more than Kim’s body, but I was also delighted with the definition of “splayed out in an awkward manner.” I agonized over how my disabilities made my body appear, getting anxious about how anxious I liked. Too angular, ajar, disconnected, simply wrong, but without any outward marker.
I didn’t think I’d grow out of my disabilities, but naively, I thought I’d encounter situations where they wouldn’t be obstacles. They added to on-the-job struggles, and I even had trouble with supposedly simple household chores.
In “Before I Go,” Clark sings to her parents, “I was never the daughter you wanted/That’s the thing we never say./ But that’s the truth, and that’s okay.” I cried, not because of my relationship with my parents but my evolving relationship with myself. In the same song, Kim sings, “here’s the ghost of a girl I’ll never be. There’s the ghost of a girl I’ll never be…let go of the ghost.”
This song felt like a message from a place my mind is to the one I’m aspiring to get to. Or to my current self to my younger one. I love the quote from Ayesha Siddiqi, “Be who you needed when you were younger.” With disability comes grief, comes grief. Not for life lost but for a forced hand, for a life that could never be yours. And grieving and loving the life you’ve created can coexist.
My continuing journey to increase my joy and contentment has been letting go of my own ghosts. I have recently realized that my visions of liberation and joy —sitting at the steering wheel, crossing state lines—still look like an able-bodied person’s. (And, to be clear, liberation for any group involves systemic shifts and is not up to the individual). Kim independently forges a journey to carve out a joyful, adventurous life, no matter how many days she has left.
Kim sings “Before I Go” to her parents (multidimensional performances by Alli Mauzy and Steven Boyer), And while not touting itself as a disability narrative, the musical succeeds where so many pieces of writing and entertainment about disability fail. Much has been written about how too many disability stories center on the caretaker of the disabled person.
In 2020, Aaron Ansuini — an autistic nonprofit founder who also Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, ADHD, and OCD — tweeted, “the fact that the writing was more preoccupied with how bothersome a baby’s screams were and how hard it was *for the parent* rather than the PAIN that baby was in is disturbing. Very reminiscent of parental abuse within the disabled community and how enabled it is. We become accessories to our parents. We become ‘hardships” that others around us had to ‘overcome,’ rather than featuring centrally in our OWN narratives—in narratives of disability and resilience.” Part of the strength of Kimberly Akimbo is how much grace and compassion it has for its flawed characters. But it never forgets who’s at the center of its story.
My struggles entail the smaller challenges too, the everyday automatic tasks others don’t pay a second thought to, like not being able to perceive mess and changing the cat litter. The things that are universally easy: that’s something else being disabled has taught me: nothing is easy for everybody. Universality can be such a false notion. As Kim’s friend, Seth (played with soulful vulnerability by understudy Miguel Gil for Justin Cooley on January 12),, and a sweet group of teens talk about how high school isn’t real life, they understandably don’t consider her very specific circumstance.
Show choir teens Delia (Olivia Elease Hardy), Aaron (Michael Iskander), Martin (Alex Vinh on January 12 for Fernell Hogan), and Teresa (Nina White) don’t exist to simply serve as foils for Kim, to highlight the magnified nature of teen feelings, or get caught up in the scheme’s of Kim’s con-artist aunt (Bonnie Milligan, bursting with star quality.) At first, they appear to be a Greek Chorus of sorts, but they’re not here. I can only speak for myself, but as an audience member, I was quickly invested in each of them. In the show’s opener, “Skater Planet,” these specific teens know “there are parties everywhere, but we never get invited.” Each teen bemoans being too “awkward…bright…anxious” or “polite,” depending on the kid. Lindsay-Abaire doesn’t minimize their struggles simply because their lives may be easier than our protagonist’s.
While I haven’t struggled like how Kim has—or even nearly as much as so many of my fellow disabled folks, whose disability often intersects with other forms of marginalization —Lindsay-Abaire’s conceit of the endearing show choir teens validates life’s smaller foibles.
In a small scene, Kim lifts the spirits of Martin (Vinh displays great open-heartedness here) and encourages his individuality after a moment of queer teen sadness. While marginalization doesn’t automatically make us anyone moral or noble, we do have the choice to extend empathy to those who suffer or are hurt in other ways. Kim’s journey is to find joy, not only for herself but for others.
Carving out joy comes more easily when you have strength, and words were always a haven for me like they are Kim’s pal Seth, who has been through his own share of trauma. They’ve served as playful shelters, and something I noticed in my spouse early on. But wordplay is only a piece of why I’m not sure if a show tune has resonated with me more than Lindsay-Abaire and composer Jeanine Tesori ‘s “Anagram.” I’m fortunate to have met my spouse, an introverted and playful man with an offbeat sense of humor and a penchant for wordplay.
There is a point where when you see yourself as “defective,” someone goofy who sees the world “a little bit askew” makes an appealing partner. I don’t think you can completely rely on a significant other to get past your own ghosts, but they can certainly help.
Kim and me, we try to carve out not only our own joy, but for others. Sometimes, in the past, that’s veered to toxic positivity on my end (the immense hope in the Act 1 ender “This Time” set me on edge, which feels intentional on Lindsay-Abaire and Tesori’s part.) I’m a little too risk-averse to sign up for a bank heist, but maybe I can be a bit braver. It feels condescending and almost self-defeating to call Kim an inspiration because Disability stories can also often fall into the category of what disabled author and editor Alice Wong calls “inspiration porn.” Wong defines this as “media coverage that finds ordinary activities by disabled people as extraordinary or inspirational to non-disabled audiences.” The show’s finale is called “Great Adventure” (the name shared with a Six Flags park is not a coincidence.)
I won’t call the show inspiring, but maybe I can credit Kim (which, of course, means Clark and Lindsay-Abare and Tesori many more) with not only showing me a sliver of myself but potentially nudging me in a more adventuresome direction while also allowing pride in the joy I’ve been able to create.