Listen to the musical’s creator, Dan Fishback, speak with engagement editor Heather Hogan on the most recent episode of our podcast:
Last weekend, a lucky group of disabled and chronically ill theatergoers in New York City attended a show that reflected their experiences and access needs. The new, non-narrative rock musical, called “Dan Fishback Is Alive, Unwell, and Living in His Apartment,” ran for two sold-out performances at the Public Theater’s Joe’s Pub on Saturday and Sunday.
Dan Fishback, the musical’s creator and subject, is a playwright and rock musician who has had myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) since 2009. The show captures Fishback’s experience living with disabling symptoms and grappling with how to push back against institutions responsible for the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, violence in Palestine, and other fascist threats.
Due to Fishback’s symptoms, he didn’t appear on stage himself; instead, actor Ron Shalom portrayed him in the show. “Alive, Unwell” is bookended by sequences in which the cast summons Fishback for him to “take over Ron’s body,” at the start, and release him back to his Brooklyn apartment, at the end.
The musical features eleven songs, interspersed with discussion from Shalom (as Dan) and the other cast members: four musicians and two performers offering dance and American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation. Songs cover topics such as living with post-exertional malaise, the challenges of dating while staying COVID-safe, and talking with your ancestors.
Adding to the ASL interpretation, a mask requirement, a livestream, image descriptions incorporated in the script, and close captions projected behind the stage all made the show more accessible. For some audience members, this was their first time experiencing live theater in several years.
This show came from “intense isolation and alienation,” Shalom-as-Dan told the audience toward the end of the performance. But the process of staging it “has connected me to so many kind and caring people.” To both the musical’s team and audience, “Alive, Unwell” demonstrates that a better, more inclusive type of live theater is possible.
“My approach for this show was to just be like, ‘This is my life. Welcome to my life here in my room that I rarely leave,” Fishback told us in a Zoom interview earlier this month. “I’m going to show you what it feels like to be here. I’m going to show you what it feels like to be me.”
Embodying ME on stage
How could Dan Fishback show us who he is when he can’t perform? Well, obviously, by writing an “esoteric kabbalistic ritual” in which his cast summons his spirit to the stage.
Dan took over the body of composer, producer, artist, and musician Ron Shalom, who actually looks a little bit like Fishback. When Shalom took the stage, he was stripped of his all-black outfit and left standing in blue and white pajamas, socked feet, and a thin bathrobe.
It didn’t take Dan very long to adapt to his new body. He was — immediately — ready to jam. He launched into a rock song, called “I Don’t Live in New York,” explaining to the audience that he spends his days in his apartment, isolated from the busy city around him.
“When I’m angry inside, I want to make rock music,” Fishback told us, explaining why it was so important to him that the show feature this genre.
During his 20s, Fishback toured the U.S. and Europe, writing music and performing at clubs every night. It was the “exciting, beautiful, messy life” he’d always wanted. A viral infection at age 21 left him feeling “tired and sickly,” but didn’t stop him from pursuing his musical and theatrical dreams. Then, in 2009, on the cusp of his first fully produced play, he contracted another virus. The common cold symptoms went away, but a crushing fatigue remained.
“I did the performances of that show on painkillers just to distract myself with some artificial joy and got great reviews,” Fishback said. “It was a moment of my life that should have been a time for celebration, but I was completely incapacitated in bed.”
Not long after, his doctor diagnosed him with ME.
Fishback says even creating the demos for this show was almost too much. “The process was so draining and exhausting. I thought I was never going to recover from it,” he said.
Despair, rage, fighting for better
It’s fitting, then, that the musical’s first song included the lyrics, “I wrote these songs I’m not well enough to sing,” before transitioning into an anthem about post-exertional malaise, called “Punished.”
In it, Shalom sang through a list of activities most able-bodied people can do automatically, like occasionally staying up after midnight, walking to the store, or talking to a friend in their backyard. After each item, the band came to an abrupt stop and Shalom mimicked falling over while the singers shouted, “Punished!”
The despair soon swelled to rage as Shalom-as-Dan sang about the ongoing pandemic and atrocities in Palestine. As an anti-Zionist Jew, Fishback has experienced this past year “as though I myself am on fire,” he told The Sick Times. The show names Israel’s continued bombardment of Palestine as genocide, aligning with many international lawyers, journalists, and human rights organizations.
In fact, Fishback was at an artist residency to flesh out the score of this musical in fall 2023. He wondered, “How am I supposed to write songs about my sick life while this is happening?” The answer, he realized, was to connect the two issues.
For Fishback, that connection revealed itself in songs about how, even if it were safe for him to attend a “regular person event,” he wouldn’t want to — because he only wants to share space with people who share a reality with him. Not only those who grieve the millions who have died of COVID-19 or been affected by Long COVID, but also those who rage at the tens of thousands murdered and displaced by Israel.
Shalom (as Dan) sang about people who refuse to fight back against this “new normal,” the people who won’t even wear a “plastic polymer mask” for a few days, the people who would call 9-1-1 if they were in his body for a single minute.
Towards the end of the show, the song “Marching from Home” responded to this betrayal with a raucous call to action. In it, Dan ponders what a person could do when they’ve been trapped at home, maybe even in bed, for months or years. When you can’t take to the streets in protest like many others, how do you go forward?
You have to agitate from inside your own four walls, he sings: “Gotta get into my marching sweats! Gotta get into my marching bed!”
Gotta get into my marching sweats! Gotta get into my marching bed!
lyric from “Marching from Home”
Multiple layers of accessibility
“Alive, Unwell” opened with the cast not only introducing each other by name, but also describing each other to the audience. Sandra Mae Frank, a Deaf ASL performer, “reminds you of a bisexual polyamorous hawk,” her castmate said. Bassist Jamilah Sandoto “is a cute as fuck Black trans woman” and Marxist who “looks like she’s read a lot of books, cause she has, y’all, she has.” Guitarist Katherine Battistoni wore a pink, shimmering dress that “in some township, in some decade, someone would have worn to prom.”
The narration added another layer of accessibility, which was a core component of the show through an approach called Integrated Access. Instead of ASL interpreters having access to the material at the last minute, the show featured Deaf performers playing Dan alongside Shalom. A large projector screen above the stage featured stylized captions of every line of dialogue and each lyric.
Those captions, in addition to describing things that blind and vision-impaired attendees can’t perceive, added another layer of creative excitement. For example, “[A swelling of grunge rock]” and “[mystical wailing]” accompanied Shalom’s entrance to the stage. “[The sound of an endless, loveless void]” provided a bridge when Shalom sang about isolation.
Masks were required and provided to audience members who didn’t come in one. Most audience members we saw were wearing N95s, KN95s, or similar-quality masks. Plus, for the first time ever, Joe’s Pub suspended food and drink service for this show so attendees weren’t tempted to unmask to eat and drink.
“My real breaking point as a theater person was finding out that Broadway was going to stop its mask mandates,” Fishback told us. “If theater as an art form is not going to protect performers from COVID-19, then you are basically telling every high risk actor, ‘Don’t be an actor.’”
If theater as an art form is not going to protect performers from COVID-19, then you are basically telling every high risk actor, ‘Don’t be an actor.’
Dan Fishback
“Alive, Unwell” demonstrated that theater can, in fact, be accessible to all audiences during the ongoing pandemic, and that it can represent people with disabling, energy-limiting symptoms. We (Heather and Betsy) left with a hope that all people with severe ME and/or Long COVID could be similarly embodied, not only to show the “able-bodied” world what these diseases are like but also to give them joy and hope in a time when that is so difficult.
That was Fishback’s hope as well. He wanted disabled people in his audience to know they were welcome in the room, to feel like the show knew they were coming. From our perspective, he succeeded. Audience members laughed, clapped, bobbed their heads, and tapped their feet to his songs. Some of us were so moved we cried and had to change our masks after we got outside.
Introducing a song early in the show, Shalom (as Dan) looked out at the crowd and declared, “This one goes out to all you miserable sickos out there!”
Behind their respirators, the sickos — many of whom were attending the theater for the first time in five years — erupted in a cheer.
Heather Hogan and Betsy Ladyzhets jointly reported and wrote this story.
“Dan Fishback Is Alive, Unwell, and Living in His Apartment” performed two shows on December 14 and 15, at Joe’s Pub in New York City and livestreamed online.
Editor’s note, December 18, 10 am EST: This article has been updated to correct audio descriptions in the final section.
All articles by The Sick Times are available for other outlets to republish free of charge. We request that you credit us and link back to our website.
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