All in a Row

A play (02/14/19) about an 11 year non-vocal autistic child that portrayed the parents experiences the night before the child was taken to a residential school for children with disabilities. It was a very controversial play from the autistic community’s perspective in that the autistic child part was played by a life sized puppet of a lifeless grey skin and unusual appearance and a puppeteer. Autistic people felt this was an insulting portrayal of autistic people where the writer Alex Oates said he wanted to portray how the general public saw this autistic boy and the puppet represented how the boy had been treated without autonomy over his own life.