Theater : Seeing the ‘Light’ : Victoria Ann-Lewis wins acclaim in a breakthrough Old Globe role that she landed because of--and in spite of--her disability

When Victoria Ann-Lewis got the call from her agent telling her that San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre wanted to audition her for a lead in a new play called “Light Sensitive,” she was elated.

At 44, after years of supporting roles on television (including four as the secretary, Peggy, on “Knots Landing”) and a dozen years of collaborating on theater workshop projects for disabled performers at the Mark Taper Forum, the disabled actress believed she had finally made a breakthrough into a leading mainstream role in a leading mainstream theater.

Then, she read the description of the character they had in mind for her--”Edna Miles . . . 38 to 48. Lame”--and her heart sank.

“It’s not because I don’t want disabled people to go out for disabled roles,” she said in an interview at the Old Globe Theatre. “I’ve fought all my life for that.”

It was just that she wanted to be considered an actress apart from the childhood polio that left her needing a plastic brace to support her weaker right leg, she explained softly.

“But then I read the play and I said this is a fabulous opportunity. It’s like playing in a screwball comedy or a Frank Capra film. My character allows me to be physically vulnerable and very strong at the same time.”

Edna, it turns out, is the strongest character in Jim Geoghan’s “Light Sensitive,” which continues through Sunday at the Cassius Carter Centre Stage.

Volunteering as a reader for the blind, Edna manages to forge a bond with an embittered, blind, ex-cab driver named Tom, and with humor, drive, intelligence and heart, she turns both their lives around.

Ann-Lewis identifies with Edna’s perseverance, her Catholicism and the love of literature that makes an otherwise tough cookie a sucker for poetry.

Ann-Lewis looks slight and small, yet she has the elegance and stature of actress Linda Hunt. She also radiates strength and authority, two qualities that she has needed to survive as an actress despite 20 years of repeatedly being told by many professionals that she would never make it in the business with a limp.

She brought her own brand of determination to the role of Edna, who will not go away even when Tom yells at her to go, threatening to hurt her if she stays. Ann-Lewis is lavish with praise for Geoghan’s work, but it is the intensity of her interpretation of Edna that has brought raves from critics who give her credit for bringing layers to what might otherwise be a somewhat slight character.

Ann-Lewis recognized Edna’s strengths, and that won her the part over other actresses who read the word lame and showed up looking fragile.

When Ann-Lewis arrived for the casting call wearing bold colors and comfortable slacks, she saw all the other actresses--none of whom were disabled--dressed in what she describes as “demure outfits, Peter Pan collars.” At first she thought she got it wrong but breathed a sigh of relief when the casting director announced:

“We’re not looking for Laura in ‘The Glass Menagerie.’ ”

“I thought, ‘Maybe I’m OK,’ she recalled with a laugh. “ ‘Maybe I’m on track.’ ”

Director Andrew Traister, who with Geoghan cast her, said that she was the only one who seemed to really know the character. Her limp turned out to be incidental to her audition, he said.

“She was the best actress for the part. It was wonderful that she was disabled, but she was our first choice whether she limped or not. Jim Geoghan was there with me and we just went, ‘That’s it.’ I saw the possibilities she could bring to the role, her dignity, her intelligence, her strength and vulnerability at the same time.”

Ann-Lewis (she puts a contraction between her middle and last name because Actors Equity already had a Victoria Lewis), credits her parents for giving her confidence.

As a child of 3, she contracted polio, and it took her a long time to learn to walk again. Parents of other disabled girls whom she knew were very protective of their children, sheltering them. Ann-Lewis’ parents put her in mainstream classes at the Ursuline Academy in her native Dallas from the beginning, never letting the suggestion be made that there was anything their daughter couldn’t achieve.

Her father enrolled her in a beauty contest when she was 5. Her mother taught tap dancing and ballet--which Ann-Lewis loved--so she was enrolled in dance classes at age 9--with a brace on her leg. Because she wanted to be an actress, they enrolled her in drama school when she was 14. To this day, her mother comes to see every show she is in--she flew out from Dallas to attend “Light Sensitive.”

One key difference between Edna and Ann-Lewis is that while Edna’s feelings about an abusive father help shape her desire to escape from home, Ann-Lewis’ memories of her father, a salesman who died at 65, when she was in her late 20s, are tender and grateful.

“My father is responsible for me being here,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “He gave me his legacy. He never realized himself. I can’t watch ‘Death of a Salesman’ without collapsing into tears.”

It was her father’s amateur performing skills--as a singer and clown--that made her want to become a professional performer.

And it was her father’s confidence in her beauty and talent that gave her the confidence to win second place in the beauty contest he enrolled her in--she’s kept the picture all her life.

“All my life, I looked at that picture as a reaffirmation of my femininity,” Ann-Lewis said. It is an affirmation she has needed often in the course of her life.

Following the advice of others, she tried to stifle her desire to perform by earning a master of arts degree in English literature at Columbia University and then taking a teaching job at a high school in Long Island for two years.

But her longing for a life in the theater never abated. She still calls theater “the place where what it means to be human is most completely explored.”

Finally, in 1970, she stopped fighting her heart and applied to the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. They turned her down flat, she recalled, telling her: “Go cure your limp and then come back.”

Past discouragement, she sought training in alternative theaters instead for the next 10 years. She joined the Family Circus Theatre, a street theater in Portland, Ore., where in addition to acting, she sewed, danced, studied mime and designed clothes. She also worked with the San Francisco feminist ensemble Lilith: A Women’s Theatre.

In 1980, she was so impressed with the Mark Taper Forum’s landmark production of “Children of a Lesser God,” a play that starred a deaf actress in a leading role, that she moved to Los Angeles and approached the company for work. At that point, the company’s consciousness of the issues of the disabled was just beginning--the theater, now wheelchair accessible, wasn’t then--but in 1981 it hired Ann-Lewis through a California Arts Council grant to teach theater skills to disabled women.

It was an auspicious decade for a disabled actress to move to Los Angeles.

It was a time when doors were opening--cautiously--to disabled performers. The 1980 success of “Children of a Lesser God” as a Broadway play and later as a film proved that a disabled actress--Phyllis Frelich in the play, Marlee Matlin in the movie, both of them deaf--could win audiences. Matlin won an Academy Award for best actress and currently is starring in a television series, “Reasonable Doubts.”

While the recognition of Matlin’s talents is still the exception rather than the rule, government financing guidelines, union bargaining agreements and now laws have grown increasingly supportive of the rights of the disabled.

By the mid-’70s, Section 504 of the National Endowment for the Arts guidelines required that anyone who receives federal financing must not discriminate against people with disabilities. By 1980, Screen Actors Guild guidelines said producers should try to reflect the diversity of the American population. And in 1990, the Americans Disability Act provided legislation mandating that no organization can discriminate against people with disabilities.

The fact that, legally, the disabled can no longer be discriminated against does not mean producers can’t continue to determine that someone who happens to be disabled is not right for a part for some other reason. First Amendment rights over artistic freedom continue to cover those kinds of ongoing rejections. Ann-Lewis has a long list of friends who have given up the struggle to perform in the face of ongoing rejection.

As an activist in Hollywood, Ann-Lewis has done her part to keep doors open to disabled artists, with her ongoing work as an artist-in-residence at the Taper and currently as director of the company’s Other Voices Workshop. Her first project there, a collage-style piece called “Tell Them I’m a Mermaid” starred disabled women talking about their own experiences in seven monologues, including one by Ann-Lewis. The cast included Bree Walker--the CBS-TV Channel 2 anchorwoman--and Nancy Becker Kennedy, a quadriplegic, who later scored an ongoing role in the daytime soap “General Hospital.”

“Tell Them I’m a Mermaid” was made into a half-hour nationally aired television piece by Norman Lear’s Embassy Pictures. The company’s subsequent piece, “Who Parks in Those Spaces?,” was also televised.

Ann-Lewis will direct her workshop’s latest collaborative work, which she co-adapted with Doris Baizley, “P.H.*reaks: The Disabled History Project,” March 26-28 at UCLA’s McGowen Hall for three performances as part of the Taper’s New Work Festival. It is Ann-Lewis’ dream that the collaborative piece, which mocks stereotypes of the disabled, will be a breakthrough for disabled performers in the way that George C. Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum” was for African-American performers.

That effort, however, is part of her life as a disabled actress rather than as an actress who happens to be disabled.

Now, with “Light Sensitive,” she hopes that she has achieved her own breakthrough role as an actress. In the tradition of Hollywood, disabled performers, like performers of color, are used to playing support roles--best friends or secretaries. This is the first time she has played a romantic lead--leg brace and all.

“I love this role, not just because it’s about disability,” Ann-Lewis said. “I love playing romantic leads. I was not allowed to play them as a child. When we played ‘Antigone’ in high school, my pretty girlfriend with the perfect breasts got to play Antigone. I got to play Creon, modeling my role after Robert Mitchum.”

Now she has come to the attention of Jack O’Brien, artistic director of the Old Globe, who said he can see her doing other roles at the Globe--that have nothing to do with being disabled.

“She’s wonderful,” O’Brien said. “We’d be idiots not to have this woman back. She can do anything. The most important thing is the special radiance of her talent.”

Being disabled will always be part of who she is, she acknowledges.

“I get stared at every day of my life. I’m not asking for sympathy or praise. That’s just how it feels to be marginalized in this society-- you’re never in one world or the other.

“As Dorothea Lange has said: ‘No one who hasn’t lived the life of a semi-cripple knows how much that means. I think it was perhaps the most important thing that happened to me. It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me. All those things at once. I’ve never gotten over it, and I’m aware of the force and power of it.’ That quote is up on my wall at home.”

And yet, she insists, what drives her to fight for opportunities for herself and others is not her disability, but what she learned from her parents’ example. They weren’t physically disabled, but had their own self-imposed limitations of spirit that kept them from realizing their own potential as performers.

“People do get stopped from realizing their dreams. It’s just a waste,” Ann-Lewis said with a look that was at once sad, penetrating and intense. “I think of my parents when I fight for non-traditional casting, when I fight for actors with disabilities, when I fight for actors of color.”