“A battle cry”
Teenage Dick playwright Mike Lew and actor Daniel Monks talk about the importance of representation, and laughter
The Californian-born playwright Mike Lew and actor Daniel Monks both laugh explosively. “It was my friend, the producer and performer Gregg Mozgala who came up with the crazy idea of doing Richard III set in an American high school and calling it Teenage Dick,” Mike recalls ebulliently. “I couldn’t let anybody else have that title!” he says. “So happily Gregg commissioned me to develop that idea.” Teenage Dick went on to premiere last summer at New York’s high-profile Public Theater, starring Gregg, and has just been nominated for two Drama League awards. Now its UK premiere has been announced: a brand new Donmar production, running over Christmas, staged by Artistic Director Michael Longhurst and with the remarkable, Australian-born Daniel taking the leading role.
“I love its witty, provocative irreverence,” says Daniel. Mike Lew’s tongue-in-cheek yet pointed update translates Shakespeare’s royally Machiavellian antihero into a physically disabled, high-IQ school kid who is determined to get elected as senior-year president, to topple the bullying dumb-ass jock Eddie (not Edward IV as we know him), and to take Anne Margaret to the prom — refusing to accept that she is, as they say, super outta his league. The slangy quick-fire dialogue is bestrewn with Elizabethan flourishes, giving the finger, as it were, to the canon but with a knowing well-read grin — Mike having majored in English and Theatre at Yale and NYC’s Juilliard School.
In fact, Daniel (who has moved to London) and Mike (who is crossing the pond for Longhurst’s rehearsals) are also both on a serious mission. “I wrote the play for Gregg as a disabled artist,” Mike explains, “having oftentimes talked shop with him about the similarities between him being an advocate for his community and me being an advocate for mine.” Gregg, who has cerebral palsy, is the founder of The Apothetae, a theatre company dedicated to productions that expansively explore disabled peoples’ experiences, whilst Mike — a third-generation Chinese-American — is resident playwright at the company Ma-Yi which proactively fosters ground-breaking new plays by Asian-American writers. “I think we’ve a long way to go in terms of disability and race and representation, what stories we prize, whose stories we air,” states Mike, who has winningly expanded Shakespeare’s underwritten female roles in Teenage Dick too.
Daniel is, likewise, passionately fired up about representation. He underlines the need to extend the repertoire’s range of disabled characters, moving on from a handful of archetypes and vintage tropes that don’t fully reflect modern lives, sensibilities and complexities. “At this point in time, we have very few authentically told disabled stories,” he emphasises. He particularly celebrates that Teenage Dick puts genuinely disabled bodies on stage (including a dance scene); that Mike tailor-made Richard’s speeches to fit Gregg’s specific physicality; and that he is rewriting key lines to specifically reflect Daniel’s own disability. Daniel sees Richard’s struggles in the ableist environment that Eddie epitomises — which Richard wants to radically change — mirrored by society at large. “So there’s a sense of a battle cry there for me, though Richard’s tactics are, of course, incredibly flawed,” Daniel remarks.
Daniel became disabled in 2000, aged 11, when a botched biopsy on a benign spinal cord tumour left him with full and partial paralysis of his right arm and leg respectively. Up until that moment, he had been blithely inspired by his actress-mother’s career, flamboyantly taking every dance class, auditioning for kids’ TV, doing commercials. Aged seven, he played Peter Pan in his own Perth primary-school adaptation, then orchestrated a mini-gig impersonating Ginger Spice. “But,” he says, “when I became disabled, I gave it up completely. I’d had enough exposure to the industry to surmise becoming an actor was no longer feasible.” So, he went to Australia’s national film school, becoming a screenwriter and director. “I remained closeted about my desire to act until I was developing my first feature film, Pulse,” he says. “I was maybe three years in — it was a very long hard road — when I thought, if I’m ever going to act, this is the opportunity I can grab.”
Screened at the 2017 Sydney Film Festival, Pulse propelled him into the limelight. A sci-fi yet personally informed teen movie about being gay and disabled, it won him a nomination for Best Lead Actor in a Film in Australia’s equivalent of the Oscars. In 2018, he was further nominated for Best Male Actor in a Play in the Helpmann Awards — Oz’s Tonys — for his main-stage Malthouse Theatre debut in a progressive reworking of the Elephant Man’s life story.
This summer, prior to Longhurst’s Donmar production, Mike will be busily co-writing two big projects with his wife and fellow dramatist Rehana Lew Mirza, who is of Pakistani and Filipina heritage: Bhangin’ It, a musical about biracial identity and an intercollegiate bhangra dance-off that has just won a Richard Rogers development award; and The Colonialism Project, an epic trilogy spanning from the British Raj to the USA today. Mike admits, with one of his explosive laughs, that he’ll be nervously fascinated to see how British audiences react to such a brazen rewrite of Richard III, by an American. Then again, Shakespeare was hardly historically faithful in the first place, and many a rejig of the Bard from West Side Story onwards has gone down a treat. As for Daniel, he is nipping back to play Roger in Sydney Theatre Company’s Lord of the Flies. “So I kill Piggy: a grim year but a great warm-up for Richard!” he quips. And he’ll be continuing his keen mentoring of young disabled Australian actors. “If I do have any success,” he concludes,” I hope I can have a positive impact, be part of a larger good, inspire hope.”
Kate Bassett is a writer and script consultant.
Teenage Dick is at the Donmar 6 December 2019–1 February 2020. Click here to find out more.
