Allison Fradkin wants people to laugh when they see her play Heard Mentality, but she also wants people to understand her experiences a bit better.
Fradkin favors fast-paced dialogue full of puns and wordplay. She wants it to be a bit difficult to actually catch everything her characters are saying. Fradkin identified as hard of hearing, and as she explains it, it’s a good way to help her audience understand what it’s like to live with a disability like hers.
“When it comes to fast-paced dialogue and wordplay, it can be hard for me as a hearing-impaired person to catch everything aurally, but I decided not to alter my writing style to accommodate my own disability, if that makes sense, because I want people without a hearing impairment to get a sense of what it’s like to have to listen extra closely and carefully so that you don’t miss anything,” she said. “In fact, I think I enjoy writing puns and playing with language so much because when it comes to the written word, I don’t have to worry about missing something. And if people do miss something when they see (hear) the play, that’s okay, because now they’ve gotten a little sample of what it’s like to be hearing-impaired.”
In Heard Mentality, puns still fly in every direction, but Fradkin is showing new vulnerability this time. The play, one of the selections for the Disabled Playwrights Workshop, tells the story of Ada, a woman about to go on her first date—and using a brand new pair of hearing aids, which come to life to help talk her through her insecurities about her date. Fradkin doesn’t typically write about disability so frankly.
“This is unquestionably my most autobiographical play to date,” she said. “Understandably, it was a little scary putting so much of myself on the page, but I felt it was vital to be vulnerable in order for the play to really connect with the audience.” It was a scary step, but one Fradkin was determined to take after hearing about the opportunity of the Disabled Playwrights Workshop.
“I discovered the Disabled Playwrights’ Workshop on Facebook while searching for submission opportunities for playwrights. I wanted to participate because of the way the program clearly—and proudly—recognizes the versatility of disability and the necessity of visibility,” she said.
In order to help the audience gain a stronger connection with the material, she chose to focus on a first date since it was a common experience that a lot of people could relate to and explore how disability can affect it. The personification of the hearing aids was inspired by the angel-and-devil-on-a-person’s-shoulders trope.
“The anthropomorphic hearing aids are the audience’s conduit into the world of hearing impairment. Ada finds them a little annoying, and honestly, that’s just how hearing aids are sometimes—their batteries might die at the worst possible moment, they might start squealing on you, and if they’re paired with the bluetooth on your cell phone, your ears might start ringing out of the blue,” Fradkin said. “But that’s the extent of the liveliness of my own personal hearing aids. Sadly, they have yet to coach me through any major life events, which would be at once horrifying and hilarious.”
Fradkin has high hopes for Heard Mentality, and wants audiences who share her disability as well as those who don’t to take something away from it.
“I hope that audience members who do have a hearing impairment will feel they’ve been represented realistically and respectfully but not too seriously; and that audience members without a hearing impairment will feel empathy but not sympathy, and also realize that despite how people with hearing impairments communicate or how we sound, we are wise beyond our ears,” she said. “And perhaps one day I’ll take this play beyond its initial ten minutes and we’ll follow Ada on her date and whatever happens next. After all, developing a short play into a full-length play is not unheard of.”
Allison Fradkin
Scriptly speaking, Allison Fradkin creates satirically scintillating stories that (sur)pass the Bechdel Test and enlist their characters in a caricature of the idiocies and intricacies of insidious isms, including ableism. An enthusiast of accessibility, Allison, who, like the protagonist of “Heard Mentality,” also has a hearing impairment, freelances for her hometown of Chicago as Dramatist for Special Gifts Theatre, adapting scripts to accommodate and celebrate actors of all abilities.
